atp2
August 25th, 2014, 02:05 AM
I tried to upgrade a desktop to Ubuntu 14.04.1 by running "sudo update-manager -d". I think this machine was previously running 12.04.3, but I'm not entirely sure now; it might have been 13.something.
During the upgrade, the "Distribution Upgrade" window froze during its "Installing the upgrades" step, while saying, "Preparing gnome-icon-theme-full". I waited nearly an hour and it never made any more progress.
At that point, X-Windows still seemed to be working, and I could ssh into the machine, but various other things were very broken (shared library errors), including sudo. Trying to do sudo anything immediately concluded that all my password attempts were wrong, without ever giving me a chance to actually type a password! Like this:
[atp@kou ~]$ grep DESCRIP /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS"
[atp@kou ~]$ ps
ps: error while loading shared libraries: libprocps.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[atp@kou ~]$ sudo ls
Sorry, try again.
Sorry, try again.
Sorry, try again.
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts
sudo has a -S option to tell it to read the password from stdin like so, but that still failed with the exact same "3 incorrect password attempts" message:
echo mypassword | sudo -S ls
So at that point I restarted the machine, and discovered that it would not boot at all. No grub boot prompts at all, nothing.
So I used the Ubuntu 14.04.1 Server AMD64 disk (which seems similar to the old "Alternate Install" disks) to try to re-install without re-formatting my partitions or deleting data. I also tried the Boot-Repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair) disk. After several rounds of both of those, things look slightly better, but I still can't boot the machine.
I strongly suspect that the problem is related to RAID and grub2. This machine uses Linux software RAID-1 (not fakeraid) with 3 disks; the third disk is a hot spare. All three disks are partitioned exactly the same way:
sda1, 150 GB, ext4, / (root partition)
sda5, 8 GB, swap
sda6, 842 GB, xfs, /data
So there are three md RAID volumes, one for each of the three partitions.
Currently the machine halfway boots and then gets stuck in some sort of mdadm loop. First I see the error: diskfile writes are not supported (http://askubuntu.com/questions/468466/why-this-occurs-error-diskfilter-writes-are-not-supported) message due to bug 1274320 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1274320). But AFAICT, that isn't actually the cause of my boot problems, as after a few seconds the boot proceeds, and I see kernel dmesg output scroll by.
But then the boot gets stuck saying this over and over again, seemingly forever:
Incrementally starting RAID arrays...
mdadm: CREATE user root not found
mdadm: CREATE group disk not found
Incrementally started RAID arrays.
I used the Boot Repair disk to record info about my system, it is here: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8135727/
Some of that doesn't seem right to me but I have zero previous experience messing around with grub2 and mdadm, so I don't know what it's really supposed to look like.
Help? (Thanks in advance...)
During the upgrade, the "Distribution Upgrade" window froze during its "Installing the upgrades" step, while saying, "Preparing gnome-icon-theme-full". I waited nearly an hour and it never made any more progress.
At that point, X-Windows still seemed to be working, and I could ssh into the machine, but various other things were very broken (shared library errors), including sudo. Trying to do sudo anything immediately concluded that all my password attempts were wrong, without ever giving me a chance to actually type a password! Like this:
[atp@kou ~]$ grep DESCRIP /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS"
[atp@kou ~]$ ps
ps: error while loading shared libraries: libprocps.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[atp@kou ~]$ sudo ls
Sorry, try again.
Sorry, try again.
Sorry, try again.
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts
sudo has a -S option to tell it to read the password from stdin like so, but that still failed with the exact same "3 incorrect password attempts" message:
echo mypassword | sudo -S ls
So at that point I restarted the machine, and discovered that it would not boot at all. No grub boot prompts at all, nothing.
So I used the Ubuntu 14.04.1 Server AMD64 disk (which seems similar to the old "Alternate Install" disks) to try to re-install without re-formatting my partitions or deleting data. I also tried the Boot-Repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair) disk. After several rounds of both of those, things look slightly better, but I still can't boot the machine.
I strongly suspect that the problem is related to RAID and grub2. This machine uses Linux software RAID-1 (not fakeraid) with 3 disks; the third disk is a hot spare. All three disks are partitioned exactly the same way:
sda1, 150 GB, ext4, / (root partition)
sda5, 8 GB, swap
sda6, 842 GB, xfs, /data
So there are three md RAID volumes, one for each of the three partitions.
Currently the machine halfway boots and then gets stuck in some sort of mdadm loop. First I see the error: diskfile writes are not supported (http://askubuntu.com/questions/468466/why-this-occurs-error-diskfilter-writes-are-not-supported) message due to bug 1274320 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1274320). But AFAICT, that isn't actually the cause of my boot problems, as after a few seconds the boot proceeds, and I see kernel dmesg output scroll by.
But then the boot gets stuck saying this over and over again, seemingly forever:
Incrementally starting RAID arrays...
mdadm: CREATE user root not found
mdadm: CREATE group disk not found
Incrementally started RAID arrays.
I used the Boot Repair disk to record info about my system, it is here: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8135727/
Some of that doesn't seem right to me but I have zero previous experience messing around with grub2 and mdadm, so I don't know what it's really supposed to look like.
Help? (Thanks in advance...)