Mid-Upgrade window lost focus/off-screen. how to regain focus?

[silentstone]

I'm in the middle of a distro upgrade to 12.04 via alternate CD. It's running from the shellscript supplied on the CD--/media/upgradecd/cdromupgrade--in gnome-terminal on a Unity desktop session. Everything was going fine until I tried to ALT+TAB to another running program while many system files were being updated. All program windows and icons and taskbars/dash disappeared, leaving a clean view of the wallpaper. No desktop keyboard shortcuts are functioning, including ALT+TAB, although CTL+ALT+1 accesses a CLI that I can log in with.

Is there a way to bring up the gnome-terminal that's currently running the upgrade, or latch into it through the CLI? The upgrader seems to still be running (it's listed as "precise" in top and ps), but resource usage has dropped so the upgrader's probably asking for input.

[silentstone]

I can run ps and top and anything in TTY1 through TTY6, so I can see that all the GUI-related processes are still open and going. And dpkg and precise are listed as running on TTY's "pts/0" and "pts/1", which seems to stand for "pseudo terminal slave N". But no command seems to allow remote viewing or control of a pts.

Here's what I've tried with dpkg:


sudo dpkg --configure --pending #got a message about the dpkg database being locked.
sudo dpkg --yet-to-unpack #gets nothing
sudo dpkg --audit #gets long list of packages

[silentstone]

Okay! Apparently, the upgrade process keeps lovely logs in /var/log/dist-upgrade folder. They show that sudo was the last package to be worked on, and the upgrader has paused on the question of keeping the /etc/sudoers file since it was user-modified!

But how do i interact with the process?