If your system hangs on “Checking Battery State” while doing updates you can look for the process that is trying to start the acpi subsystem by doing a ps aux | grep acpi
the line should look something like this:
root 25873 0.0 0.1 4012 1504 pts/1 S+ 20:48 0:00 /bin/bash /etc/init.d/acpi-support start
That second line is the PID (process id) to kill that process you just need to issue sudo kill 25873
Of course, the PID on your system will differ from 25873.