Crash during upgrade to 10.10, system unusable

[johann_p]

The upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit, which was running fine, to 10.10 crashed during the installation of the packages. When I boot the computer now, I see the login screen, but neither the mouse, nor the keyboard work, no login is possible and no switching to a text login screen is possible. Power off is the only working option.

When I boot using the safe mode, I see the boot messages and then:



Begin: Running /scripts/init-bottom ...
Done.
mountall: Keine Verbindung zu Plymouth
After this, the system hangs and can only be powered off.
The last message is in German because this is a German Ubuntu installation, it is equivalent to

mountall: Could not Connect to Plymouth

I am very frustrated about this ... anything to save the system?

[mörgæs]

Plymouth is a central part of Ubuntu, so I don't think that it is worth the effort to rescue the system. Better to save your files and do a fresh install.

On a working system you could try to run

sudo apt-get remove plymouth
without confirming!!! to see how much depends on Plymouth.

[sikander3786]

Before re-installation, you can try to boot into Recovery Mode and drop to Root Shell and perform these commands.

Connect to internet,


dhclient eth0

Replace eth0 with your network interface.


sudo apt-get update


sudo apt-get upgrade


sudo apt-get dist-upgrade


sudo apt-get install -f


sudo dpkg --configure -a

[johann_p]

Unfortunately, booting into recovery mode did not work either ... same lockup.

What I ended up doing is something that was recommended on the German Ubuntu board:
http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/chroot/Live-CD (in German).

It boils down to doingt this:
* booting an Ubuntu Live CD
* mounting all the relevant mount points in some directory of the live CD system (/mnt)
* copying over relevant data
* starting a chroot shell with the directory where the hard disk system is mounted as root
* repairing the broken installtion there by repeatedly doing
"apt-get -f install" and "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade"
* exiting the chroot shell
* rebooting

After rebooting the system was usable and with some additional package updates/upgrades it now looks like new and is running 10.10