poctob
October 31st, 2009, 02:32 PM
Well I tried to upgrade my Jaunty system to Karmic. I've been using Ubuntu for several years and didn't expect any problems. I forgot that nobody repealed Murphy's law yet.
First issues were a long time and slow speed for the packages to download. No problem. I figured that servers are overloaded with a lot of people upgrading. I left it running overnight and most of the day Friday. When I got home I was happy to see that the install has started. I had a Pam.d dialog on the screen that wanted me to restart some services. Here comes the fun part - keyboard and mouse no longer worked, so I could not click on any buttons. No CTRL+ALT+F7, no CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE, no CRTL+ALT+DELETE, nothing. I tried another keyboard and mouse, I even dug out an old PS/2 keyboard, still no luck. Looks like upgrade process turned off some service like a hotplug or hald. I could see that my machine wasn't locked since a system monitor applet was occasionally showing network activity. I had ssh server turned off as well. So I am in a middle of upgrade and have no way of continuing since I don't have an access to the machine.
I crossed my fingers and powered it off. Finger crossing didn't help, machine would not get past first part of the kernel init.
Rescue time. I downloaded and burned Karmic Install CD on my laptop and booted into the live session. Next thing I did was to mount my existing partitions. First I opened a terminal, became root and created a mount point:
$ sudo su
# mkdir newroot
I needed to find my original partitions:
# ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda5 /dev/sda6 /dev/sda7 /dev/sda8 /dev/sda9 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1
I remembered to have my system on separate partitions but I could not remember the numbers. So by trial and error I found one with a root and mounted it:
#mount /dev/sda6 newroot
Next I mounted my other partitions:
#mount /dev/sda7 newroot/var
#mount /dev/sda8 newroot/home
#mount /dev/sda9 newroot/usr
Next thing is to change system root to the original partition so it can be repaired:
#chroot newroot
I proceeded to create some generic devices, it may not be necessary but I did it anyway:
#cd /dev
#MAKEDEV generic
I got a bunch of error messages, but nothing serious. Next thing was to mount proc system:
#mount -t proc proc /proc
Now everything is ready it is time to resume the upgrade:
#dpkg --configure -a
#apt-get update
Process has started. After some time I got more errors and it didn't finish, it got stuck on some OpenOffice and KDE packages. Well, I tried to boot it anyway. I restarted the machine and I got karmic splash screen. Great! Not so fast. GDM never started and all I got was a command shell. Not a problem once again:
$sudo dpkg --configure -a
$sudo apt-get update
Failed immediately, however
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
worked! That went on for a while, told me it was complete and gave me some broken packages warning at the end.
Reboot and I have GDM login. Everything worked! I logged into the system, used Synaptic to locate broken packages, reinstalled them and ran an update.
I ran an update on my laptop and that worked flawlessly. So I don't know if the issue is the particular hardware on my desktop (Dell Precision 380) or something else.
Good luck with your upgrade!
First issues were a long time and slow speed for the packages to download. No problem. I figured that servers are overloaded with a lot of people upgrading. I left it running overnight and most of the day Friday. When I got home I was happy to see that the install has started. I had a Pam.d dialog on the screen that wanted me to restart some services. Here comes the fun part - keyboard and mouse no longer worked, so I could not click on any buttons. No CTRL+ALT+F7, no CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE, no CRTL+ALT+DELETE, nothing. I tried another keyboard and mouse, I even dug out an old PS/2 keyboard, still no luck. Looks like upgrade process turned off some service like a hotplug or hald. I could see that my machine wasn't locked since a system monitor applet was occasionally showing network activity. I had ssh server turned off as well. So I am in a middle of upgrade and have no way of continuing since I don't have an access to the machine.
I crossed my fingers and powered it off. Finger crossing didn't help, machine would not get past first part of the kernel init.
Rescue time. I downloaded and burned Karmic Install CD on my laptop and booted into the live session. Next thing I did was to mount my existing partitions. First I opened a terminal, became root and created a mount point:
$ sudo su
# mkdir newroot
I needed to find my original partitions:
# ls /dev/sd*
/dev/sda /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /dev/sda5 /dev/sda6 /dev/sda7 /dev/sda8 /dev/sda9 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb1
I remembered to have my system on separate partitions but I could not remember the numbers. So by trial and error I found one with a root and mounted it:
#mount /dev/sda6 newroot
Next I mounted my other partitions:
#mount /dev/sda7 newroot/var
#mount /dev/sda8 newroot/home
#mount /dev/sda9 newroot/usr
Next thing is to change system root to the original partition so it can be repaired:
#chroot newroot
I proceeded to create some generic devices, it may not be necessary but I did it anyway:
#cd /dev
#MAKEDEV generic
I got a bunch of error messages, but nothing serious. Next thing was to mount proc system:
#mount -t proc proc /proc
Now everything is ready it is time to resume the upgrade:
#dpkg --configure -a
#apt-get update
Process has started. After some time I got more errors and it didn't finish, it got stuck on some OpenOffice and KDE packages. Well, I tried to boot it anyway. I restarted the machine and I got karmic splash screen. Great! Not so fast. GDM never started and all I got was a command shell. Not a problem once again:
$sudo dpkg --configure -a
$sudo apt-get update
Failed immediately, however
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
worked! That went on for a while, told me it was complete and gave me some broken packages warning at the end.
Reboot and I have GDM login. Everything worked! I logged into the system, used Synaptic to locate broken packages, reinstalled them and ran an update.
I ran an update on my laptop and that worked flawlessly. So I don't know if the issue is the particular hardware on my desktop (Dell Precision 380) or something else.
Good luck with your upgrade!