Can't get past a black screen with underscore, Linux mint

[whyohwhy22]

Turned my laptop off and on again the other day as it was lagging. On startup, there was some unusual text on the screen and then it went to a black screen with a flashing underscore. I tried switching from it to the console thing, and it won't log in - if I put my username or 'root' it just flashes about a critical error underneath and asks for the credentials again

I've started in recovery mode and tried the dpkg option, and fsck and a clean. This stuff came up:


So it looks bad. Also, the menu has something about Bluetooth written over the top when it loads.

Can anyone help?

 

[KGIII]

Instead of trying the dpkg option or whatnot, try booting to the previous kernel.

 

[whyohwhy22]

Instead of trying the dpkg option or whatnot, try booting to the previous kernel.

Just tried it, sadly it didn't work.

 

[KGIII]

Well, that's not good. I was optimistic. I don't suppose you have a recent backup?

(Also, wait before doing anything too drastic - others may have ideas.)

 

[captain-sensible]

Nothing unusual for the fsck image . You can't or shouldn't run fsck on a mounted drive ; i.e a running fsck from the same running OS .
when i was using Slackware I found i could do it by dropping run levels but the other way is to boot a live OS from say a usb and run fsck on the blocks devices to the PC that the usb is attached to.

When i've booted say Debian with persistence using ventoy from a usb, i got the blinking line on a black screen. I waited maybe 10 minutes , and the Desktop came up eventually . Did you try several minutes to see if the black screeen chnaged ?

 

[kc1di]

Boot to rescue mode, connect to the internet then enter the terminal and this command

apt --fix-broken install

Post any error messages you receive here.
If that does not work you may need to boot from a live usb backup any important data and then do a new install of mint.