If you are getting the 'Fail Safe Terminal' up then it's not a total disaster. Is networking working? Try pinging 'yahoo.co.uk'?
Tiswas is quite right look at the syslog to see if there are any obvious errors. But I have a feeling there is just a corrupt file somewhere stopping Unity or some other desktop component from starting properly.
If you are getting the 'Fail Safe Terminal' up then it's not a total disaster. Is networking working? Try pinging 'yahoo.co.uk'?
Tiswas is quite right look at the syslog to see if there are any obvious errors. But I have a feeling there is just a corrupt file somewhere stopping Unity or some other desktop component from starting properly.