I have been lurking your site for the past few hours, and have found myself in a bit of a pickle.
Visiting my parents, I discover that neither computer, nor laptop work. Long story short, I've got the laptop working, but have completely fudged up the computer.
I am a n00b, but I was at least willing to give it a go.
The comp originally had ubuntu 11.10 installed, later updated to 12.04. We have cds for both. I do not understand what the initial problem was for my parents, but somehow when I turned on the computer, it worked for me.
Soon after, I was nagged to install the latest updates. So, I spent the next half an hour wondering why the updates kept on asking for 11.04 cdroms, until I realised that you could turn off the cdrom necessity. After doing this via console, I installed some of the smaller updates, before being told to do a partial update. This failed a few times, and ended up freezing whilst reinstalling drivers.
After a hard restart I continued to type whatever I could find on the forum into the console. At some point, the console started saying that I had 3 incorrect password inputs, and sudo commands stopped altogether. I found another thread discussing this; but people kept on suggesting changing passwords (which I did to no avail) or other things that made use of sudo (which I am locked out of, although I am technically the admin)
I found myself somehow on the Ctrl+Alt+F1 console, and after being utterly confused (and Ctrl+AltF5 failing for me), another hard reset occurred.
Somewhere along the way I created a USB start up for 14.04, (but this does not seem to work)
Now I am left with an admin (and guest) account that log in but have blank screens (with only the desktop background showing) and I can't do anything in the console because I'm locked out.
Interestingly, the console now says that I am running 14.04 although all updates said they had failed.
Aside from the obvious lessons I have learnt (don't fiddle about in the console when you have no idea what you're doing
"Dog wearing safety glasses "I have no idea what I am doing" GIF would be inserted here )
Is there any way I can redeem this almighty muck up?
A million thanks for any help!
