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View Full Version : [SOLVED] Intrepid -> Maverick upgrade failed, machine unbootable (urgent)



acchavez
November 24th, 2010, 02:35 AM
A few years ago, I managed to convince my father-in-law (he will be 67 in December) to give Linux a try. We purchased a Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu pre-installed. So far, he's been very happy with it.

It had been quite a while since we upgraded, and we decided that it was time to bring it from Intrepid up to Maverick. I knew we had a long process ahead of us so I was having him leave it on at night while I performed the upgrades remotely via SSH. I was of course sure to perform this stepwise, upgrading first to Jaunty, then Karmic, then Lucid, and finally to Maverick as per the instructions on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes.

I got as far as Karmic, and during the do-release-upgrade phase, sshd closed the connection and I was unable to connect to port 9004 (in retrospect probably because I forgot to make a port redirect on his firewall), so I had him reboot the box. It would fail to boot past "waiting for xx filesystem," (I forget the exact message) so I had to pay him a visit. Not having any other options available and being in a hurry, I booted a Knoppix 5.3.1 DVD and ran "dpkg --configure -a" in a chroot (he has one root partition plus a home partition). This was a "proper" chroot mind you, with /proc, /sys, and /dev/pts mount --bind'ed.

I received only a few warnings, but the keyboard started behaving erratically and wouldn't let me respond to prompts so I had to reboot and re-run "dpkg --configure -a" once, which resulted in a successful upgrade. It would seem that it was the incompleteness of the upgrade was hindering it, despite editing /etc/fstab to use /dev/sd* rather than UUIDs, with and without following with update-grub. The system would now boot, but now the system is behaving quite strangely. Xorg doesn't always come up right away, some fonts seem to be corrupted (we must switch to a console tty and then back to tty7 to work around both aforementioned issues), and the system is operating very slowly.

I have attempted to run "aptitude reinstall \~i", but I keep getting stopped during the process on individual packages that complain that "the file" isn't there (again, I forget the message but I remember it being very vague). After doing some searching, it seems 'rm -fR /var/cache/apt/archives/*; mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial' should do the job, and with CDs in hand it should go much quicker. I have also tried "dpkg-reconfigure -a", but it stops with a different, seemingly deb-dependent message.

I would normally provide more specific messages but I was told that his system tried to perform a filesystem check the other day and is now unbootable once again, so I apologize.

I'm getting worried and don't want to see him disappointed or burden him with a complete reinstall. I am planning to visit over Thanksgiving (Nov. 25 for non-US readers) with Karmic, Lucid, and Maverick "alternate" CDs in hand to try to fix the problems. How can I recover from this?

acchavez
November 24th, 2010, 03:30 AM
A little more research has revealed this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7647357&postcount=3.

Assuming that it's just a broken package and not something fundamentally and horribly misconfigured as a result of using Knoppix, it seems that executing the following after backing up /etc and /var (/home is, again, on a separate partition) should do the trick:

# SELECTIONS=$(mktemp)
# rm -fR /var/cache/apt/archives/*
# mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial
# dpkg --get-selections > $SELECTIONS
# dpkg --set-selections < $SELECTIONS
# apt-get dselect-upgrade
# rm $SELECTIONS

Can anyone confirm that dpkg --(get|set)-selections works between releases? I'm thinking the best thing after all may be to dump $SELECTIONS somewhere, wipe the root partition, install Maverick, and send $SELECTIONS (which, I will emphasize was generated by Karmic) back to dpkg.

acchavez
December 9th, 2010, 10:51 AM
Simply running those commands on Karmic fixed any problems that were occurring, which enabled me to continue on the upgrade path to Lucid and finally to Maverick.