Failed to start Load Kernel Modules Ubuntu 16.04

Solution 1:

OP solved their problem as follows:

[FAILED] Failed to start Load Kernel Modules was a red-herring. rtc is an obsolete module. The error message was removed by switching to tty1 (ctrl+alt+F1) and commenting out rtc (putting # at the start of the line) in /etc/modules (using sudoedit).

Now the computer would just boot to a blank screen.

Again in tty1, I then tried to connect to the internet, but sudo dhclient eth0 gave me this error message :

failed to stat component /etc/dhcp/dhclient-enter-hooks.d/debug: No such file or directory
failed to stat component /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/debug: No such file or directory

It turned out broken symlinks were to blame for that so to fix it:

cd /etc/dhcp/dhclient-enter-hooks.d
sudo rm debug
sudo ln -s ../debug.dbkg-new debug`

and then

cd /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d
sudo rm debug
sudo ln -s ../debug.dbkg-new debug

So then it was possible to do sudo dhclient eth0

ping google.com returned unknown host google.com but ping 8.8.8.8 worked fine, so this was fixed by doing echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' | sudo tee /etc/resolv.conf as advised by steeldriver in this comment

With internet connected at last, all problems were fixed by running:

sudo apt-get update
dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt full-upgrade -f
sudo apt -f install