Keyboard and touch-pad stopped working after shutting down the computer while it was installing updates

When I boot my notebook, the touch-pad and the keyboard don't respond. The last thing I did before shutting down was killing the terminal that was running a sudo apt-get install because I had to go.

I tried to follow the Start Ubuntu in recovery mode

but the second screen (Select the root shell option ) does not appear in my computer, it runs some process and then it freezes

I have the ubuntu liveCD and I can mount my hard drive from there but I'm not sure what commands to run from there.

Thanks in advance for any help.


You can try to chroot into your system from the live CD and continue the upgrade.

  1. Run the live CD and start a gnome-terminal (Alt + F2gnome-terminal).
  2. Issue the following command to mount your system (change sda1 to whatever your system partition name is - the output of the command fdisk -l should give you an idea):

    sudo mkdir /mnt/ubuntu
    sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/ubuntu
    
  3. You need to bind a couple of local directories to the chroot environment:

    for i in proc sys dev; do sudo mount --bind /$i /mnt/ubuntu/$i; done
    
  4. Enable DNS resolving in the chroot environment (should give you internet access):

    sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/ubuntu/etc/resolv.conf
    
  5. Now it's time to get into your broken system (note, that you will be the almighty root user in the system, so be careful what you do):

    sudo chroot /mnt/ubuntu
    
  6. Try to continue the update:

    apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade
    

    You'll maybe told to also try

    apt-get -f install
    

    If that fails you can also try to continue the configuration of unpacked packages:

    dpkg --configure -a
    
  7. After you've tampered with the system, you type exit to leave your system and then do the above steps in reverse order:

    sudo rm /mnt/ubuntu/etc/resolv.conf
    sudo umount /mnt/ubuntu/dev
    sudo umount /mnt/ubuntu/sys
    sudo umount /mnt/ubuntu/proc
    sudo umount /mnt/ubuntu
    
  8. Reboot without the CD and hope for the best.