upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04

[Yashpreet]

I was upgrading my laptop from the version 13.10 to 14.04. During installation, a message popped up saying installation could not proceed as computer is unstable however after restarting the computer, the mouse is frozen in the middle of the screen flashing on and off and a message keeps flashing saying report a problem however I am unable to click anything as the cursor will not move. Please Help!

[Bucky Ball]

Welcome. Was 13.10 running fine prior to attempting to upgrade to 14.04? How did you upgrade? Is this through Software Updater or a terminal or are you talking about a clean install of 14.04 over the 13.10 partition?


During installation, a message popped up saying installation could not proceed as computer is unstable

This kind of indicates that things were not well prior to the upgrade. If you were upgrading because 13.10 had an issue you couldn't resolve, what was that issue? It might lead us to the reason for this one. :-k

[Yashpreet]

thanks! I was running 12.04 and then step by step upgraded to 13.10 and then to 14.04. I upgraded via Software Updater (a message came up saying upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04)

[Bucky Ball]

Pity. Long-term support releases upgrade directly to the next LTS release. Consequently, you can go from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS directly without needing to upgrade through 13.04 and 13.10. This is a long, laborious and often problematic route, and is possibly the cause of your current issues.

Have you backed up your important data? If so, I would probably suggest a clean install of 14.04. If not, I would suggest you do that back up and then install 14.04.

BTW, 12.04 LTS is fully supported until April 2017. Was there a reason you needed to upgrade to 14.04?

[Yashpreet]

I tried going from 12.04 straight to 14.04 but it wouldn't allow me and said that I must upgrade in stages. How would I do that? And I upgraded as it wouldn't allow me to install important security updates through the Software Updater

[Yashpreet]

Also I cant click anything as the cursor wont move

[sudodus]

The official way to do it is to wait until the end of July or beginning of August, when the first point release will arrive, 14.04.1 LTS. At that time there will be a tested and debugged updater from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS.

-o-

Not Recommended:

Only if you have a good backup, you can try to run the script 'early' with the option -d or option -p. I'm not sure in this case what happens, if it might try to upgrade to 14.10. And even if it works reasonably well, you might have to do a lot of fixing and tweaking to succeed.


From man do-release-upgrade


NAME
do-release-upgrade - manual page for do-release-upgrade

SYNOPSIS
do-release-upgrade [options]

DESCRIPTION
Upgrade the operating system to the latest release from the command-line. This is the pre‐
ferred command if the machine has no graphic environment or if the machine is to be upgraded
over a remote connection.

OPTIONS
-h, --help
show help message and exit

-d, --devel-release
Check if upgrading to the latest devel release is possible

-p, --proposed
Try upgrading to the latest release using the upgrader from Ubuntu-proposed

-m MODE, --mode=MODE
Run in a special upgrade mode. Currently "desktop" for regular upgrades of a desktop
system and "server" for server systems are supported.

-f FRONTEND, --frontend=FRONTEND
Run the specified frontend

-s, --sandbox
Test upgrade with a sandbox aufs overlay

SEE ALSO
update-manager(8), apt-get(8)

[sudodus]

I tried going from 12.04 straight to 14.04 but it wouldn't allow me and said that I must upgrade in stages. How would I do that? And I upgraded as it wouldn't allow me to install important security updates through the Software Updater


Also I cant click anything as the cursor wont move

If you have no good backup, and must save your crippled 13.10 system, I suggest that you run in text mode. Boot with the option text (enter it in grub at the other boot options quiet splash and reboot. See this link

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Setup#A.2BAC8-etc.2BAC8-default.2BAC8-grub

And then you can try with these command lines (originally posted by oldfred)

Use sudo -i


# This will reinstall if not current. (from my chroot procedure which does not have sudo on every line,
# so use the sudo -i first).

#if not chroot use: sudo -i

#houseclean
apt-get autoclean # only removes files that cannot be downloaded anymore (obsolete)
apt-get clean

#refresh
apt-get update #resync package index
apt-get upgrade #newest versions of all packages, update must be run first

#would upgrade you to the latest kernel in the repositories
#dist-upgrade is also able to remove existing packages if required
apt-get dist-upgrade

# fix Broken packages -f
sudo apt-get -f install
dpkg --configure -a