16.04 - system hangs at boot time at "Started Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes"

I have an Acer Aspire One netbook with an Intel Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM. I've been using Ubuntu and a few other distros on it with no problem for two years now.

I have used both Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu 14.04, 14.10, 15.04 and 15.10 flawlessly, with casual distro changes (Arch Linux, openSUSE, Linux Mint, elementaryOS, Debian). No problems at all. But today I decided to move back to Xubuntu, so I grabbed the "mini" installation ISO from ubuntu.com, wiped out the Debian Jessie partition and installed the system there. After the installation was completed, I installed the "xubuntu-core" metapackage and rebooted.

But the system got to a "Started Update UTMP about System Runlevel Changes." message and sits there, with a blinking cursor. I could access other TTYs by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fx and even startxfce4 (as root), but that issue was really annoying me. So I downloaded a Lubuntu 16.04 ISO from lubuntu.net and went to install it. As I didn't have a DVD or USB drive available, I put it in a backup partition and booted the Lubuntu installation media with GRUB2, using

set root=(hd0,msdos4)
loopback loop /lubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/lubuntu-16.04-desktop-i386.iso config noprompt noeject
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
boot

But it also got stuck in the exact same message. The difference is that now I can't change TTY, but I think it's because it's a live media. Some people suggested it may be a graphics driver problem, but I'm not sure. I also saw a similar problem with some Mageia folks.

Can someone help me?

I landed here by googling 'lubuntu 16.04 started update utmp about system runlevel changes'. I saw this same message and I thought the system hanged. But actually I could ctrl-alt-f1 and switch to console. Eventually this thread solved my problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2321317&p=13478810#post13478810 In short, I did sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel and rebooted, then everything went ok.

My background situation is different from yours, though. My setup is quite simple -- it doesn't involve loopmount. However, it was not a straight install either. I installed lubuntu in a lenovo x220i notebook, booted into a different partition, tar czf the lubuntu 16.04 partition, transferred the .tgz to an old computer (which I can't find make and model for now), tar xzf the image into an empty partition, and set up the extlinux boot loader.

If you loopmount, you would see some udates, like FRONT_BACKEND=original and also --- instead of just -- and so on.

Anyway, I think the new installers have some logic issues with detecting the media, when you loopmount from a hard drive. And it doesn't seem to cp it over to /cdrom but maybe it should have been /media.

Either way, I recall having this issue and I don't remember if I resolved it as I don't use ubuntu. Either way, you should get into the seed installer if , as I say, you take a little look at updated boot commands.