If you didnt encrypt the drive you can spin up a live usb transfer your files to an external hardrive and reinstall?
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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My suggestion would be to use an Ubuntu installer ISO to get access to your broken system so you can backup anything important and then reinstall Ubuntu. It will just be faster than trying to salvage a broken upgrade
Ah, the ancient ritual persists.
Sometimes blowing everything up is easier. And more fun!
Adding that this would work even if OP uses full disk encryption, as it's encrypted with a passphrase; just double-click the drive in the file manager and enter the encryption passphrase when prompted (NOT a sudo password!)
Can you switch to console? Try ctrl+alt+F2 when the system is booted up and log in to that.
I suppose some package update was interrupted or crashed. You can attempt to re-run what's missing with 'sudo apt-get install' and 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a'. And, assuming your console access works, you can at least check log files on what's wrong, but for that I don't think any generic 'read /var/log/syslog' file is too helpful as there's a ton of stuff and with things like journalctl it's pretty difficult to navigate around if you don't know what you're looking for.
And also, more details would be helpful. What you mean by 'enters a loop', what it actually says that went wrong and so on.
This is good info OP, this is the basics of how you fix it
I had a similar issue a few years back and I fixed it by entering TTY2 by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 and figuring out what broke via the terminal. My issue was that xorg couldn't start because some dependencies broke after installing an update.
Bad advice, my apologies. But, I've had great success with LLMs to tackle such problems. Be cautious. However, if you've got no time to waste, then it might be your best option.