12.04 - 14.04 upgrade crash and burn

[pcal]

Hi guys,

Been running my Fujitsu netbook on 12.04 since.. 12.04? Finally decided to OK the persistent popup request to upgrade to Trusty. Big mistake!

After the initial checking and downloading, it drove me insane for about 45 minutes with one popup fractions of a second after the last, demanding I click on the notification that yet another file couldn't be installed because it was already installed. Eventually, I had to leave the machine for a few minutes to deal with a biological imperative. I came back to a window advising the upgrade had been aborted due to too many errors. I could switch between workspaces, but nothing was operational. Rebooting didn't even get to the gui.

So, my OS is completely trashed. All my critical files were on a nas drive, so there are only a few very current working documents that would be more a frustration than a disaster to loose. Is there any hope of restoration, or will I just burn a live 14.04 and plug in the trusty old external DVD drive?

Thanks in anticipation,

Pcal

[tgalati4]

Create a LiveUSB of 12.04 (since that presumably works), and boot off of it. Use the file manager to find your personal files and dump them to yet another USB stick.

Wipe the machine and perform a clean installation of 14.04.

Without knowing what the errors were, it's hard to recommend any precise steps to recover your system. A clean installation will bring your system to a known state.

Expect to spend some time to fix things and tweak your system the way you like.

[skompier]

Sorry to hear about your failed upgrade. I would burn a 14.04 disk then boot off of it and copy the documents that you need to a thumb drive or NAS. Then do a clean install of 14.04.

[pcal]

Not having any luck at all with this. :(

Burned 14.04 but can't boot with it. Gets to the splash screen with Ubuntu logo and crashes - every time. So I downloaded Lubuntu 14.04, and unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing! Can't even change any boot options as it doesn't get that far...

Don't have the 12.04 iso on my nas drive any more. Can download it again, but is it worth it as it's about to go unsupported? The only running OS I have for this machine right now is WinXP, and that would be a fate worse than death for the poor machine. Is there another way I can go?

pcal

[pcal]

I've downloaded 12.04 again, and it installed OK(ish)...

Bit worried what will need to happen once support runs out, but in the short term I now have a smaller issue.
I selected the installation option to erase the old 12.04 and reinstall, assuming it would put everything back in the same places that the original had them. But it didn't...

I had a number of partitions on the hdd, one of which was mounted as / and another as /home. The installer has put everything into the / partition, including a new blank home folder. Is there a simple way I can get the newly installed OS to mount my old home partition as /home and return the space it has allocated for the new home folders back to /? I know I could reinstall 12.04 again, and select the manual option to specify what to put where (I would have done this except that I thought it would do it automatically as this is how the old install was set up), but was hoping I could do it without reinstalling.

Cheers.