[Solved] - Tower's 1st [no, 3rd] Hard-Reset since clean-reinstall.

[kdemeoz]

Stupid me. I am writing this post on my Lappy now, as i managed to break my Tower    Sequence to destruction:
1. In Maui Settings i changed back from Nouveau to the latest Nvidia driver, then rebooted.

2. i ran this in Konsole, then rebooted:

Code:

sudo prime-select intel

3. Tower would now only present a black screen after the Maui splash screen.

4. I toggled to tty, accessed grub with nano, & inserted "nomodeset" before "quiet splash", rebooted, & was again able to reach the login screen & login.

5. I was unable to understand if i was now truly using the Intel GPU, so i captured some Settings pics, intending to upload them here for assessment. However prior to that, i made the following bad decision...

6. I dumbly thought i would now remove kernel 4.9.9 [ok], but using  Synaptic rather than following the Ubuntu instructions https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds [not ok; dumb dumb dumb] -- i only realised my mistake a bit later, when it was too late.

7. So that's what i did, & was "surprised" that it only removed ONE file, "linux-image-4.9.9-040909-generic" [as best i can now recall, a couple of anguished hours later], not also "linux-headers-4.9.9-040909" & "linux-headers-4.9.9-040909-generic".

8. I rebooted, thus sealing my fate.

9. Tower now repeatedly hung at the 2nd splash-screen.

10. Trying to boot any of the other older installed kernels, including the recovery mode, still ended in splash-screen hang.

11. Now i assumed this misbehaviour was coz i crippled 4.9.9, by removing 1/3 of it but leaving 2/3 of it behind.

12. Therefore i decided to try, in tty, following the proper Ubuntu removal procedure "Uninstalling upstream kernels" at the link i pasted above. That is:

Code:

sudo apt-get remove linux-headers-4.9.9-040909 linux-headers-4.9.9-040909-generic linux-image-4.9.9-040909-generic

This has now removed "linux-headers-4.9.9-040909" & "linux-headers-4.9.9-040909-generic" [grep no longer finds them].

13. However i could not also remove "linux-image-4.9.9-040909-generic", due to the message it's "not installed, so not removed"... doubtless coz of my Synaptic idiocy.

14. Subsequent reboot attempts continue to hang at the 2nd splash-screen.

15. I returned to tty & repeated my... 

Code:

dpkg -l | grep "linux\-[a-z]*\-4.9.9

...which unhappily discovered that "linux-image-4.9.9-040909-generic" is still found [the other two are not, anymore]. Yet all attempts to remove via...

Code:

sudo apt-get remove linux-image-4.9.9-040909-generic

... continue to fail, with "not installed, so not removed".

16. Catch-22.

Other than toss myself off the roof, can anyone offer some recovery steps please?