Well, I seem to be a hard drive killer. Several months ago, I had a laptop with harddrive problems, which required me to replace the disk.

Now, I have a separate laptop, which I has a bunch of bad sectors (I don't know how long they've been bad, but I accidentally dropped the computer a few day ago), resulting in a bunch of bad blocks. I've managed to remap these bad blocks using e2fsck -y -c -f /dev/sda5, but for some reason I can't get TTY working again.

Whenever I enter any of the TTY screens, I am greeted with a blinking cursor, which resembles a white underscrore. From there, the computer completely ignores anything I try to type. TTY doesn't even so much as ask me to enter my username/password (If I try to enter my password anyway, I will again be ignored). All I can do is switch back to my desktop using CTRL+ALT+F7.

Since TTY is part of the GNU Core Utilities, I decided to try running repair coreutils ("repair" is a bash alias, which in turn runs sudo apt-get -y --force-yes --reinstall install), but that didn't help at all. I've also tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure coreutils, and again... no dice. The only thing I haven't tried yet is removing coreutils altogether, running 'apt-get autoremove --purge', and reinstalling coreutils from scratch (I'm too scared to even so much as try something like this, unless necessary!).

I'm currently running the Cinnamon desktop (lightdm login), on Ubuntu 13.10 i386 Desktop editon. Also, if I run sudo -i login from gnome-terminal, it pretty much works as expected.

PS: I don't want to buy yet another hard drive, as I'm only working part time, and could use the money for other things.

Update:I think the problem might lie with getty (or agetty), as everytime I run 'getty 0', I get a segmentation fault error. Does anyone know how to reinstall getty? sudo apt-get install getty doesn't seem to work (E: Unable to locate package getty), likewise for agetty.