Each time I reboot I get stuck at two or three of various lines (usually starting with "/dev/sda1") such as:

/dev/sda1: recovering journal (always shows up)
/dev/sda1: Clearing orphaned inode ...followed by numbers (saw this once)
/dev/sda1: clean, ...followed by numbers (different each time, always shows up)
Started clean up any mess left by 0dns-up (saw this once)

Then it promptly hangs...

The method I used to install KDE came from this page: https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/install-kde-plasma-5-7-ubuntu-16-04-ubuntu-16-10

commands given on that page to install were:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

There was actually another command between those two I had to run (apt-get -l install) that was prompted by the 2nd command. I think a prerequisite was needed for it.

This last command seemed to fail at the end (but it exited to a shell prompt). Upon each time I reboot I get a pop-up window which was the start of the problem:

"The system is running in low graphics mode"

I click OK and whatever selection I make on the next window, I cannot get past the issue mentioned at the beginning.

I can ssh in from another machine, but not sure what files to remove or change to get it to recover and boot up.

Learned a hard lesson on this...this cannot be recovered in any way shape or form.

Best thing before installing KDE on an Ubuntu VM...backup the VM. This thing is so thoroughly trashed I can't even SSH into it. Nothing can be done to save it.

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Update:

Don't know what the deal with this is, but I started with a fresh Ubuntu 16.10 VM (which I backed up this time), then installed:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Still same issue. Gives a couple errors, asks me to report the errors (which I did) and then exits. Reboot and back to stuck on:

/dev/sda1: clean ... (numbers of files and blocks)

I don't use a monitor connected to the physical machine the VM is on. Is there a problem doing that? I go through a remote interface.

Thanks,

Steve