Let me start off by saying I'm dual booting 11.04 and Windows 7 on a Thinkpad T61p.

The problem may have arisen when I hit the power button during normal startup. I'm fully aware how stupid this is. I don't know why I did it. I did it.

Now, I can't get in to Ubuntu. Windows works fine. But when I try to start Ubuntu normally, it seems to run some checks, and does not start up. Sometimes, I see a black screen, and it tells me that it's running certain checks, and then, [ok]. Like...
Battery Check Somethingorother [ok]

It'll give me 1-5 of these. And then it just does nothing, and I have to turn it off.

When I try to start in safe mode... I tried low graphics mode, and after going through a couple of dialogue boxes, I'm brought right back to the safe mode dialogue box. And if I hit 'resume,' a shell pushes up (still that grey on black "your computer is broken" type shell) and asks me to log in. I do, and try to run unity. It tells me something along the lines of:
WARNING no DISPLAY variable set
and then sets it to " :0" , which doesn't work.

And then I can't do anything, really, and I have to restart. (I don't know how to do this from the command line, so I just hard reset. That command would be helpful).

Does anybody have any idea how I can get Ubuntu working right again? FTP is less pleasant in Explorer than it is in Nautilus or w/e it is now.