Ubuntu Self-Destruct!

[Lucifer666]

Hello everyone, hope the Christmas holidays are going well.
Unfortunately I'm finding myself in a bit of a predicament.

So last night Ubuntu offered that I upgrade to 12.10. (I believe I was on the version just before that, if I'm not mistaken) And I accepted.

All right so I believe the final step of the upgrade was to reboot into the new upgraded version, and sure enough, when I woke up this morning and moved my mouse to turn the screen on, I was greeted with a new interface.

I think Ubuntu just destroyed itself.

Right so the launchpad on the left is non-existent. Same for the bar on the top. I have a cursor and my old wallpaper, nothin else. I hotkey myself into the "change wallpaper" window, and yes, I can confirm the GUI is completely damaged. The window does not have the 'X' button to close the window, nor any of the few buttons next to it. The whole bar isn't there. It just sort of cuts off above the "File..." options. I can't minimise or stretch pages. I hit F3 and managed to explore my files. I went into File System and searched for Firefox until I found the executable file, and this is how I'm typing this right now, on a very small window taking up about 1/5 of my screen, which I inconveniently have to scroll around to properly type this. To sum things up, obvious problems include:

• No launchpad to the left
• No bar at the top
• Cursor is unstable and keeps flashing
• Any windows I manage to open are incomplete (can't hit X to close, minimise, stretch, etc)
• Most applications/programs I attempt to open crash upon execution
• My screen resolution appears to be off

What I've tried:

• Hotkey-ing myself into the settings to try to have the launchpad not auto-hide. It still won't show
• Checking out the 'drivers' section of 'All Settings' because I believe this may have something to do with my graphics card driver. To my surprise, the 'Drivers' bit under 'All Settings' completely disappeared with the upgrade. It really cannot get any more inconvenient
• Double-clicking the top of incomplete windows in an attempt to stretch them across my screen. Whatever application I luckily manage to run crashes instantly when I try
• Changing my screen resolution. I only have two options, both of which are 4:3 which for starters isn't even my screen's aspect ratio. I just chose the higher of the two, but obviously it still looks wrong

I do have another operating system. (Windows 7, unlicensed but perfectly functional) However I have about 40 gigs of very important data onto the Ubuntu partition, which I cannot access at all on Win7. I load both operating systems from grub, which now after the upgrade, presents me with the options "Ubuntu", "Ubuntu with advanced settings", "Windows 7", and one more option, can't remember it off the top of my head.

Anyway I've given as much detail as I possibly can. Pictures and videos can be provided if necessary. I'd really appreciate it if someone could shed some light on the situation. I really don't know what to do.

Cheers, and thanks in advance.

 

[Jiggah]

Welcome to Linux. I'm not currently running Linux at all, but in the past when something screws up I usually turn to the terminal for the fix. Why not just try getting to the terminal and running the command to uninstall Unity then reinstall it? i.e. "sudo apt-get install unity"

If your files are super important and you don't really care for staying on Linux, you can always use the command line to move the files over to a FAT based external storage, or use a driver install on the Windows side to be able access the Linux partition.

 

[Ritsuki]

I think I had that problem once, the update did not apply correctly. I had to do a check of all the installed packages, and noticed that the ones from the update were broken. I used Synaptinc to fix it, but I'm pretty sure there's an apt-get command to do that.