Can't restart

Trusty Tahr on Acer Aspire R5-471T.

After grub, I see the loading dots
.
..
...
....
.....
and the screen goes black without tuing off and stays that way. This happened after I powered it off because I had no feedback from the touchscreen or touchpad.

I tried booting to recovery mode and then resuming normal boot. I got the message

* Starting ACPI daemon
initctl failed

What's going on?!