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View Full Version : [ubuntu] 9.04 Upgrade Gone Horribly Wrong



tick1492
April 28th, 2009, 02:16 PM
Hello to all.

So yesterday, I attempted to upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 and have ruined my Ubuntu install. I'll walk you through what happened below...

First some background: Prior to my upgrade, I had some issues with synaptic. I had 'corrupted' packages that I didn't know how to fix so I just left them there. I think this was do to a hardware issue, certain inode sections on my harddrive were constantly corrupt and corresponded to the synaptic packages. However, in my 8.10 installation I got it to a point where synaptic would install something new but would crash in the process. This was satisfactory for a while so I left it this way. Weird.

So with that in mind, I figured that maybe I can install 9.04 and just have synaptic 'crash'. That was stupid. So I went through the process and of course, synaptic crashed fatally halfway through.

In the process of that, I lost xserver and now have no graphical interface. I ran dpkg --purge xserver-xorg to remove the bad xserver package. I also ran fsck and clean to attempt to fix my drive.

So my first issue is. How can I get xserver back? I tried running
sudo apt-get update
sudo appt-get --reinstall install xserver-xorg

But I can't connect to the repositories, I get multiple errors saying:
'could not resolve 'us.archive.ubuntu.com'

So now you may be thinking, why not changes the /etc/apt/sources.list and try downloading from a different source? I tried that and I still can't connect to anything to download xserver.

So I need help badly! Let me know of any other info I can post. Thanks to all who help.

tick1492
April 28th, 2009, 02:19 PM
Sorry but I forgot to mention that my goal is to simply get back to my 'stable' 8.10 installation.

I figure that with my hardware issues, it's too risky to upgrade to 9.04.

Thanks again.

timcredible
April 28th, 2009, 03:25 PM
i would suggest you backup your data (boot with a livecd and do that), and then do a 9.04 clean install (9.04 is really good). your system is hosed currently, there's really no way to fix it rather than clean install. a clean install is what i would recommend in every situation, btw.

tick1492
April 28th, 2009, 03:28 PM
i would suggest you backup your data (boot with a livecd and do that), and then do a 9.04 clean install (9.04 is really good). your system is hosed currently, there's really no way to fix it rather than clean install. a clean install is what i would recommend in every situation, btw.


Ok, I think I will have to go that route. I've been digging a bit more and it seems to complex, I just want an easy solution and a clean install of 9.04 should hopefully work.

One other option I explored was doing a 'system restore' as per Heliode's guide at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

What do you think of this instead of the 9.04 install?