Ubuntu 16.10 booting in emergency mode after upgrade from 16.04

Question

Ubuntu 16.10 on my Lenovo G500 is booting in emergency mode after upgrade from 16.04. The previous upgrades worked just fine (14.04 to 15.04 to 15.10 and so on).

Things I already tried:

1. Attempt 1:

   • Booted using Live Ubuntu 16.04 DVD.

   • Started a terminal and did a file check on the my root partition i.e: e2fsck -pvf /dev/sda9

   • Rebooted from HDD

Result: Booted in emergency mode

2. Attempt 2

   • Booted from Live Ubuntu 16.04 DVD

   • Did a tune2fs -l /dev/sda9 | grep -i check, turned out fsck was last performed in July 2016.

   • Mounted /dev/sda9 and created a file forcefsck in `/´ directory
   • Rebooted from HDD.

Result: Booted in emergency mode.

After rebooting the screen looks like this:

Tune2fs results look like this:

I am out of ideas.

Update

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.10, with the contents in my $HOME directory intact. But I still do not know the exact reason, why it failed to boot.

Answer 1

Found a simple permanent solution. This worked for me on 16.04.2 LTS:

1. In your GRUB menu, go into edit mode and find the kernel/linux line that contains "splash quiet" and replace $vt_handoff with nomodeset. You should now be able to boot properly.

2. Edit the file /etc/grub.d/10_linux. Find the vt_handoff variable, around line 27 and change vt_handoff="1" to vt_handoff="0" and save the file.

3. Finally:

   $ sudo update-grub
   

4. Reboot