9.04 from 8.10 upgrade crash- partial upgrade

[pjhudson]

Hi - I was upgrading to Jaunty from 8.10 and while it was downloading the packages, I went to check on it but it was frozen with only the background showing-- no mouse, no pointer, keyboard didn't work, nothing-- so I forced it off and then back on, it booted fine to my 8.10 version and then told me that it had to do a partial upgrade-- so I clicked the partial upgrade and it went for a few and then said it "failed to fetch---" a whole bunch of lines and packages... I tried again and it seemed to start downloading alright but it was taking a long time and I got a little scared about the partial upgrade so I cancelled it....
now I've decided to just install the updates in the manager that have shown up (it says 513 out of 917 files)-- but I really don't know what I'm doing and I don't know what to do about the partial upgrade deal and how to upgrade to the new version.

[Unhban]

I'm having a similar problem.

Upgrading from 8.10 to 9.0.4 it seemed to stop at around 'post-updating trigger man-db'. The rest of the machine was still running, but the update manager seemed to have stopped... I left it for an hour to make sure.

I had to reboot and used kernel 2.6.27.11-generic (recovery) to run the dpkg thingy which sorted things out.

Once booted up into 2.6.28.11-generic all seems to work, except Update Manager says Not All Updates Can Be Installed and I should only do a partial upgrade. When I say yes, it asks Do You Want To Start The Upgrade, I click Yes and it disappears into thin air.

apt-get update says it's hitting various http URLs but ends with Reading Package Lists... Done.

Unh.

[sygin]

Hi,

One thing to check is disk space. Make sure that your root drive / has space left on it. From the terminal run the command:

df

It will list your drives and their respective usage levels.

i.e.

sygin@bob:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 11534708 3016668 7932104 28% /
tmpfs 1030784 0 1030784 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1030784 136 1030648 1% /var/run
varlock 1030784 0 1030784 0% /var/lock
udev 1030784 184 1030600 1% /dev
tmpfs 1030784 88 1030696 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1030784 2392 1028392 1% /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sda3 44466568 29261900 12945864 70% /home
/dev/sda4 222332792 180251676 42081116 82% /media/storage
/dev/sdb2 154395988 144695504 9700484 94% /media/backup
/dev/sdb1 40957684 36706080 4251604 90% /media/windows


If you have no space, try running:

sudo apt-get clean

This will clear out the downloaded packages, and try again.

Cheers,
Sygin

PS: Apologies for the formatting.

[dino99]

hi,
upgrading is a little scary: all the new packages replace the old ones !!!

Previously to Jaunty, i was like you upgrading (it's easier indeed) but the result is not very clean: lots of .conf are not properly managed due to new patches embeded in the kernel or driver.

So, a clean install on a new partition is much better and stable.
For a dist-upgrade, first it's necessary to remove or deactivate all the extra repositories added in sources.list (there is so much change to do, don't need to have more with those ones). Then, clean, autoclean , autoremove and finally install -f. At last, with synaptic, find and remove the obsolete files or orphans (or use gtkorphan). After an update, it is necessary to update the sources.list to Jaunty, save and hard reboot.

During dist-upgrade , if something is wrong, read the warnings and use the command line if possible !!!

[Unhban]

Thanks Dino, but it sounds a lot of hard work that - especially when in UM I can hit a button UPGRADE.

But it was Sygin that sort of hit the nail on the head. I did have plenty of space on the hard drive but did try sudo apt-get clean as I thought it may 'do something', and it did - it seemed to set everything to a level playing field. Then, through UM I was able to download 550 files in the Partial Upgrade.

However, when it had downloaded the last file the box disappeared leaving me with nothing! So I'm presuming that part of Update manager on my machine is broken.

Is there an apt-get command I could now use to install those downloaded files? Or possibly dpkg? As you can see I'm fairly new to this!

With thanks for all the help, guys.

EDIT!: (11.55AM) Decided to actually read the apt-get manual! And plumped on the following commands which worked and sorted the rest of the upgrade.

apt-get update (to let the system know what files I already had and where it could get more files if needed)
apt-get distr-upgrade --no-download (I'd downloaded 550 files and didn't want to do that again, but it balked at --no-download as, as I found out later, it still needed one 10k file)
apt-get distr-upgrade (worked fine right through and asked me to reboot at the end, which I did and all seems well!)

These commands may seem like falling off a log for some but for newbies hope they're of some help when things go wrong during an upgrade! :)

Unh.