Hardy hangs while starting sys log daemon, X server constantly restarts after sys log daemon timeout

[Jonas]

A few hours ago I upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy Alpha 6. Everything went fine, including reboots, until I applied a bunch of updates roughly have an hour ago. One of them failed during the post-processing step (can't remember its name unfortunately). Ever since that update the system hangs during startup when it is trying to start the system log daemon. After a timeout (of about 4 minutes) the system continues to boot and tries to bring up the display server. The display server then crashes repeatetly until a warning message appears that the display server has been shut down more than 6 times in 90 seconds. Switching to a terminal and logging in results in the following:

malloc: ../bash/subst.c:3472: assertion botched
free: called with unallocated block argument
Aborting...

After which I am presented with the login prompt again. Booting with the old Gutsy kernel does not help, neither does starting in recovery mode. It is hard to give more specific error information since I cannot even log in.

[SergeyS (ssedreev)]

The same happened to me :-(. I cannot boot now... I had to use live CD to write this message.

[Jonas (j-n-s)]

My bug seems to be related to 201673. Apparently the latest libc6 update is broken and causes many, many things to break. See http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722886 for more information.