This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help. Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it: sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........

mdadm: metadata format 00.90 unknown, ignored. This happens with various versions of older mdadm such as mdadm - v2.6.7.1 - 15th October 2008 It is all because an extra 0 in 00.90 in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf that it doesn't like (it doesn't seem to cause any problem except that message though): Solution - Edit your /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf and change 00.90 to 0.90 in your arrays: ARRAY /dev/md3 level=raid1 num-devices=2 metadata=0.90 UUID=f41a4644:6b2a05f........