System starts in emergency mode...how do I recover ?? (as a newbie)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 00:10:09 +0200,
  antonio montagnani <antonio.montagnani at alice.it> wrote:
>Suddenly my laptop when rebooted doesn't start in the usual way After 
>six months of hard work) but it stops when bootib with this message
>drm:cpt-serr_int_handler ERROR PCH transcoder a FIFO underrun
>and the appears some lines with request for password for maintenance 
>mode or CTRL-D option...

Was there a kernel update betwen reboots? If so, try booting the previous 
kernel.