RPi 2 - Black Screen

[crazy8]

I am working on a huge project and just now started having issues. I had just installed Kali 2018.4 and last night I performed an update and upgrade. Everything went well from what I could tell. The only hiccup was that towards the very end of the upgrade my phone died (I was tethered since getting Kali to connect to the companies wifi, which uses PEAP authentication proved to be quite difficult to configure). However, once I got my phone back up, I was able to get the upgrade to continue and everything seemed to go fine from that point on as well.

I let everything unpack over night and other than getting a message to install/upgrade Postgresql from v10 to v11, everything seemed to be going quite well. I decided I was going to configure the pi to autoboot into the root account.

lightdm.conf

autologin-user=root
autologin-user-timeout=0

What I didn't do yet was:

cd /etc/pam.d
nano lightdm-autologin

For some reason, I thought "Since the big upgrade, I should reboot before I get to far ahead of myself" (before I did the second set of commands shown above). I don't believe that the file edit did anything, though I suppose it could, but rather feel that it was something in the upgrade that is the reason for the black screen. When I power on the Pi, I see the colored rainbow screen, and then all of the scrolling text, but after that is finished the screen goes black rather than showing the login. I really don't want to completely start over. Is there a way to interrupt the loading process to open a command prompt to, at the very least, change the edits I did in the lightdm.conf file, if not somehow correct this issue? Is there anything I can do?

Thank you

[crazy8]

UPDATE: I did find that I could use ctrl+alt+f3 and that did work to get me to command prompt. I have been playing a little and trying to get it online again. The only issue I am having is that when I try to connect, I keep getting endless attempts of...
authenticate with.....
send auth to.....
authenticated
associate with.....
RX AssocResp from.....
associated.....
deauthenticating from.....

So from what I can tell, it doesnt actually connect. I did see that their was an error that would keep popping once in a while, no matter what I was in the midst of, which read "EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2) Delayed block allocation failed for inode 249457 at logical offset 16 with max blocks 1 with error 117"

I have never seen this before, but based on what the Googles has shown me is that it's either a fs issue or an issue with the SD card and being corrupted. Any input, words of wisdom, somethings I can try to fix it, or even a nice warm hug would help a lot. thank you

[re4son]

Hi crazy8,

Your black screen might be caused by the latest version of systemd that came with the upgrade.
You can downgrade to the previous version via:

mkdir -p ~/Downloads/systemd && cd ~/Download/systemd
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libsystemd0_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libnss-systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libpam-systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
sudo apt install ./*.deb

You might want to put systemd on hold until that problems is fixed by running:

apt-mark hold systemd

Hope that helps and please let us know how you go.

[crazy8]

Hi crazy8,

Your black screen might be caused by the latest version of systemd that came with the upgrade.
You can downgrade to the previous version via:

mkdir -p ~/Downloads/systemd && cd ~/Download/systemd
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libsystemd0_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libnss-systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
wget http://http.kali.org/pool/main/s/systemd/libpam-systemd_239-10_armhf.deb
sudo apt install ./*.deb

I did this and have been successful at doing all of the other stuff I need to do without the black screen happening again. Thank you very much for your help.