Am running 11.10 64-bit with Gnome-shell. Something happened late Friday whereby my machine never gets to the login screen. I do get to an Ubuntu splash logo, after that I get a text screen that it hangs on.

The screen is referring to issues with mounting various network resources, including VMWare and also some references to my NAS that are in fstab.

If I hit "esc" I can get to the GRUB menu and into recovery console. If I try to do a file system check, I run into a similar error screen that I see when trying to boot normally.

A possible clue here is that during my last good session I made some mods to the /etc/hosts file to reference another system which I'm connecting to with Synergy.

I don't believe I have hardware issues as I'm able to boot properly with a Live USB and connect to my network/Internet.

A few more tidbits. I have regular Dejadups backups on my NAS. I have a good Clonezilla whole drive image which is 4-6 weeks old.. My home is encrypted.

I thought I'd try blowing away my hosts file via live USB, but when I mounted the hard drive everything was read-only and I couldn't figure out how to replace it.

P.S. I logged in via CLI and modded the host file to remove the entry I'd made, to no avail. System continue to gets stuck on the following:

CIFS VFS: default security mechanism requested. The default security mechanism will be upgraded from ntlm to ntlmv2 in kernel version 3.1s

Would love some sober advice on how to attack this.