Gah! I’ve upgraded to 9.10; then on a subsequent reboot I was “slimming down my system” more on that later and have messed up “mountall” causing it to error on boot in standard and recovery mode. Won’t boot, not even to a console.

Mountall error gives status 127

I’m sure I’m guilty of this but I wish people would say “I don’t know” when they have no clue what they’re talking about .

This has absolutely nothing to do with X windows.

The system is failing to mount the drives properly (access the hard drive partitions) – the only fix I’ve seen is to use a rescue disk (your Kubuntu install disk will do). Then:

• chroot from the disk to your broken root partition,
  e.g. “sudo mkdir /media/sda1; sudo mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /media/sda1; chroot /media/sda1″ (depends on your setup, use “fdisk -l /dev/sda” if you’re not sure of your root partition, could be on sdb, sdc, sdd too) and
• complete the “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”.

YMMV, sorry.

Bug report: answers.edge.launchpad.net
Ubuntu forums: ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org (solution) , ubuntuforums.org (no solution as of now)

chroot gotcha

If you get an “exec format error” when you’re trying to use chroot, as in the above fix, then it’s likely because you’re using a rescue disk from a different architecture (e.g. i386 rescue disk on x86-64 system, or whatever). You’ll need to fix that in teh obvious way.