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I often get trapped when I don't follow advice of "Never upgrade Ubuntu"!
In procedural way, (attempted) upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04. Though I got some errors in the end stating something like:

Your upgrade was finished but had some errors.

After that my PC was neither restarting not shutting down. Hence I had to hard press the shutdown. Now I am writing this question from mobile, because 16.04 has never started! :-(

The boot menu appears & upon selecting the regular Ubuntu, it freezes after a while to a blank screen which shows:

/dev/sda5: clean (some blocks)

The login prompt never comes. I ran various options from "recovery mode" including fsck to no help.

If I get to 16.04 then better, but will be happy if I get my 2 hours prior 14.04 as well.

iammilind
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  • The safe and easy way: Boot with your live installation media, backup your data and install a fresh Ubuntu 16.04. There will be errors always present in an upgraded system, when the upgrade is made over a previous version already installed. Always is better to make a fresh install. I always do fresh installs and never had problems. – GTRONICK Aug 26 '16 at 12:40
  • @GTRONICK, I understand. If I do a fresh install now, will my data of previous 14.04 be retained? My PC is a dual boot with Windows 8.1. I have lots of software installed in it. Is there any way to go back to 14.04? – iammilind Aug 26 '16 at 12:44
  • Umm, well, that scenario is more complex. You can retain your data, if you move it to a partition which wont be overwrited on install, or if you have a dedicated /home partition. For example, if you have these partitions: /dev/sda1 = boot, /dev/sda2 = swap, /dev/sda3 = root, /dev/sda4 = home, you can safely install Ubuntu again using the sda1, 2 and 3 partitions. In the install manager, enter the manual or advanced mode, and select the correct partitions, do not format your /home partition and be aware of touch or modify your windows partitions. Search for "Install Ubuntu alogside windows 8" – GTRONICK Aug 26 '16 at 12:49
  • If you do a fresh install, keep on 16.04 LTS. It should work fine. If you want to go back to 14.04, make a fresh install of 14.04 LTS. But do not try to remove, or go back in packages versions from the installed system. It is very probable that you get many errors and problems, – GTRONICK Aug 26 '16 at 12:53
  • @GTRONICK, suppose I go by your way of fresh installing 16.04, but still retaining the dual boot, then is there any way if I can make a backup of certain data residing within Ubuntu. I have these options: (1) Copying via recovery mode (2) Copying from the dual boot Windows 8.1 (which still works!). For the option (2), I have found out some tools like "Linux Reader". If that doesn't work out, would you recommend how to use the option (1) (or any other possibility for that matter)? – iammilind Aug 27 '16 at 03:24
  • You dont need no use recovery mode. Just use the live USB or live CD and boot into it. Then, connect an external hard drive to copy your data, using the "Try Ubuntu" option in your live media. Best regards – GTRONICK Aug 28 '16 at 11:37
  • @GTRONICK, Thanks for the tip! I freshly installed Windows 10 in place of Windows 8.1, which went smoothly. Then I freshly installed Ubuntu 16.04 in place of (so called) 14.04. That also worked well. Now I am logged in from there. In the boot menu, now it shows "Ubuntu", "Windows" & "Ubuntu 16.04" as the primary options. "Ubuntu" refers to this real "16.04" and "Ubuntu 16.04" refers to the corrupted 16.04 which couldn't get upgraded from 14.04. It still can't login and shows the same behaviour as I described in the question. That will remind me of not repeating this mistake again! :-) – iammilind Aug 29 '16 at 06:31
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    Excellent! Now you can check some GRUB information to delete the corrupted entry. Have a nice day! – GTRONICK Aug 29 '16 at 16:24

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