Totally stuck after upgrading to 12.04

[dFlyer]

Hey folks!

Please help me fix these... I have invested 100s of MBs of download and time to upgrade this! I neither have patience nor the connection speed to download a new copy and run through all of this again!

Any sort of help would be much appriciated!

My advice is to backup everything if you have not already, and download the live desktop cd about 700 megs and do a fresh install. The only other options are spend mega hours trouble shooting which is time consuming which you stated above you don't have the time for or switch to another OS/distro which will be very time consuming and possible mega downloads.

For me a complete install with additional programs and restore of about 200 GIG of photo's takes less than 3 hours including the download of the live desktop.

But than if you want to learn, by troubling shooting your OS, usually linux can be fixed, sometimes with just a few clicks of the mouse or command line edits, up to mega hours of research trial and errors. Again time spent is yours. If you want to try and fix, pick one problem and lets see if we can work through it, but lets do it one problem at a time.

[darkod]

More problems... the Ubuntu CD installer doesn't recognize my existing Ubuntu installation, which would be fine... except I only get two options when installing: 1) Erase everything and 2) Something else

I chose something else so I can use my existing partitions (and not destroy my windows partition and all my backed up data) but it only shows /dev/sda with the only option to create a new partition table. I know they are there... I can see them in fdisk...

That might be because the disk has raid meta data remains on it if it was used in fakeraid earlier. In this case the installer doesn't show the partitions.

Another reason is if there is error or corruption in the partition table. That would be why it doesn't show partitions.

You can check for raid meta data with:
sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda

If that asks you to remove meta data, you have it. But only remove it if you are NOT running raid, otherwise it will destroy your array.

For errors in the partition table you can check with fixparts. Usually it can repair smaller errors.