12.04 upgrade failure

[elemennop]

Hey I tried to update my system from 11.04 to 11.10 and then 12.04 using the update manager. However during some point in that second step there was some issue, and it froze. Upon rebooting, the grub gnu shows only 5 options. "Ubuntu, with linux 3.0.0-24 generic" being the first, ten recovery mode, then previous linux versions, and finally memtests. When I try the first, it goes to the command line with an error of "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ling.so.6 version 'GLIBC_2.14' not found". Filesystems can't be mounted, and whenever I try to do something it says read konly. I've tried recovery mode as well. Any ideas?

[Topsiho]

Seems that the upgrade failed, leaving you with an unusable broken system.

Only thing I can think of, is to do a fresh install, of Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

If you can wait a few days, then you may download the next point release, 12.04.1. That means a release that contains all updates until now, which means far less updates to download and install after installing Ubuntu 12.04LTS...

Topsiho

[elemennop]

Seems that the upgrade failed, leaving you with an unusable broken system.

Only thing I can think of, is to do a fresh install, of Ubuntu 12.04LTS.

If you can wait a few days, then you may download the next point release, 12.04.1. That means a release that contains all updates until now, which means far less updates to download and install after installing Ubuntu 12.04LTS...

Topsiho

Alright, I figured that may be the case. I have my old home folder saved to an external harddrive, will it cause problems if I just dump it back into the new one?

[Topsiho]

I am not sure, so I don't know. Never had trouble using my old /home, sitting in it's own partition on the hard disk.

*** What you should avoid is moving the old /home into the new /home :) ***

The old /home folder also contains configurations (in hidden files, starting with a dot (".").

If you want to be sure, just copy your personal files into the new /home folder, and configure your system from scratch.

You anyhow have to install the extra applications that you need from the repositories (I always use synaptic for that, you might have to install synaptic first: sudo apt-get install synaptic).

Success,

Topsiho

[darkod]

Don't hurry with a clean install.

Try the recovery mode again, but do this first: When the recovery menu shows, select Network first so that it tries to activate the network. At the same time, it makes the root partition read/write which is very important.
Then select the Drop to root shell option.

If that worked, you will have the root shell with a read/write root partition mounted. At the shell try this to finish off configuring all pending packages and broken ones:

dpkg --configure -a
apt-get install -f

Note that the word sudo is missing in front of those commands because you are already in the shell as root.

[jibawakee]

Also don't skip over things

;)

[elemennop]

Thanks, but I already did a clean install. Yeah, it would have been nice if home was in its own partition, it's something I forgot to do when I initially setup my system. I remembered to do it this time.

That being said there are certain configurations I would like to get back if possible, e.g. my setup for pidgin. For pidgin it's trivial, since I only need a couple files and could do so manually. But I would prefer not to have to do it manually for each program. Is there any elegant solution?

[Topsiho]

The configurations are in the hidden files in the old /home. So you might select the relevant hidden file(s) and copy it (those) into the new /home.

Whether this is elegant or not I don't know :)

Topsiho

[Fred_C]

my wife machine is having the same problem, but I haven't done a clean install yet. I tried the network option on the safe mode, but it can't run the network manager. the message is:

mv: cannot stat '/etc/samba/dhcp.conf.new': No such file or directory

Help!