Last update: 2012-8-21
The same problem (see below for the original article) occurred again in the second week of February 2012. Seems to be triggered by a kernel header update. (During mid-2012, there has been several months in which this problem did not occur so I originally thought this was fixed. Sadly in August 2012 it occurred again.)
This time I used the following steps when it stuck at Checking Battery State:
Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to bring up a terminal then login
sudo service lightdm stop sudo service lightdm start
This will bring up the ubuntu desktop (but does not solve the problem on reboot), so I can do some web searches if necessary. Please note that I use a Z68 chipset PC with on-board graphics. Any other hardware configuration may very well be different in the steps required to fix similar problems.
I launched a terminal, then type:
dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia
It only shows nvidia-common. (It is very likely you will get different results if you use a hardware configuration different from mine.) I need to reinstall this, so I typed:
sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-common
It reported that nvidia-common is used by ubuntu-desktop which is also removed. To get both reinstalled, I typed:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
I made sure it also reinstalled nvidia-common. After it finished, I shutdown the PC and restarted it to confirm it can boot properly.
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Date: 2011-12-13
After Ubuntu 11.10 performed an automatic update, it refused to boot up, and was stuck at Checking Battery State. After some google searches, I tried purging and reinstalling (sudo apt-get install) the following packages:
- lightdm
- ubuntu-desktop
- lightdm-gtk-greeter
- unity-greeter
It still did not work. Installing gdm instead of lightdm would allow logging in, but the interface is different. And some UI things seem strange. Plus unity-3D would not work.
Some people solved the problem by reinstalling the nvidia driver. However, I’m using a Z68 chipset system with on-board Intel graphics (i.e. I have no nVidia hardware), so I should not need to do it. Strangely doing a “dpkg –get-selections | grep nvidia” would show “nvidia-common”. So I tried reinstalling it, then the normal login screen can be shown. (Some people say it is also necessary to “rm -f ~/.Xauthority”.)
At this point, logging in unity-3D would be abnormal (just show a menu on top), but unity (2D) worked. Then I did the followings to recover the unity-3D:
- rm -rf .config/compiz-1/
- rm -rf .compiz*
- rm -rf .gconf/apps/compiz*
- rm -rf .cache/compizconfig-1/
- unity –reset
Toke me 3 hours to solve this.