Everything is borke
After upgrading to the 3.0 Linux kernel everything broke. This was somewhat anticipated and I had put it off until after my dissertation was due to avoid any extra stress.
The suspected cause was the nvidia dev driver I was using for Open CL GPU programming. I knew there would be a need to recompile of the kernel modules. What wasn’t anticipated was that I wouldn’t be able to boot in to a proper recover console and everything else would start breaking… soon after upgrading the PC wouldn’t get much past the grub menu and wouldn’t boot from a usb drive so I couldn’t reinstall Ubuntu. At this point I gave up and left the PC for a month because I could use my laptop instead.
On trying once again to fix my PC I discovered the fairies had made things worse. Now no signal was coming from graphics card.
After a good 4 hours I was able to get signal from the graphics card, boot from a usb driver and re-install Ubuntu. Here are the things I did (in order) that may or may not have contributed to getting things back up and running:
- Removed graphics card and vacuumed dust,
- Vacuumed dust off CPU and case fans,
- Removed CMOS battery for ~2 minutes,
- Swapped RAM DIMMs to spare slots
- After swapping the ram the PC returned to the (broken) state that it was when I first left it, except for some reason I could now boot from a USB drive and re-install Ubuntu.
As a result of having separate partitions for home and root I didn’t lose any personal data or settings and only had to re-install my favourite apps to get back up and running.