Comment 1 for bug 203295

Had the exact same problem. It seems as though Hardy upgrade is selecting the wrong kernel. My guess is that you had a number of kernels installed on your system. I had about 20 or so going back to 2.6.18 days or before. After I upgraded to Hardy my system was only configured (insmod, initramfs, ldconfig, etc) for the 386 kernel, which is almost completely useless on a desktop/laptop system.

The solution I found was to follow these steps:

1. Uninstall all my old kernels including 2.6.24.12-generic but level the 386 kernels installed (in case these go horribly wrong, 386 will almost always boot).

2. Uninstall linux-generic, linux-image-generic, linux-headers-generic, linux-restricted-*, etc.

3. Re-install all of the latest generic using this command:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic

What this does is to re-install, re-configure and re-compile a working generic kernel. After I rebooted and selected that kernel, I was able to get into linux fine and then re-install all my other restricted drivers. Sound, video, networking all work decently well. After things are running smoothly, you can safely remove all the 386 packages.

This is really, really critical to fix for the full release because non-technical users will be completely lost since they usually have no clue what a kernel is and how to install and configure them. I'd make this a blocker for release if I were the Ubuntu team.

Let me know if you you need logs or files from my system. I'll wait a week or so before making and huge changes in case you need something.