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View Full Version : [ubuntu] My journey to 16.04, or, There and Back Again



Randy M
August 23rd, 2016, 03:18 AM
I finally succumbed to the reminder to upgrade to 16.04. After all, it's nice to stay up to date, to have the latest and greatest, to be on the forefront, the leading edge, or as it turned out, the edge of disaster. I was plugged in to power and had a fully charged battery, as well as being connected to the internet via cat-5 instead of on WiFi. Life is good. I clicked on the upgrade button and everything installed with no error messages or perceivable glitches. Soon, it was time to reboot and enjoy the benefits of an up to date system. When the system rebooted, it presented two errors that referenced some problem with the backlight, then hung. I gave it a while to sort things out. Sometimes it just has to find its way. Sadly, it never completed the boot. I finally gave up, shut it down, and restarted the system. It griped about the backlight again, complained about a couple of other things, and asked for a username and password. Entering them presented me with a command prompt. I've been around the block a few times and command prompts don't scare me. They aggravate the heck out of me, but they don't scare me. I tried a few things, some from here and some from memory, but nothing made much difference. I realize that I could have asked for help here, and that I would have received expert help quickly, but I decided to just rebuild and restore. It was about this time that I realized that I didn't make a backup before I started. I was not amused. After a few quick self kicks, I booted up a copy of Linux Mint from a thumb drive and copied all my files (and Firefox and Thunderbird data) to a USB hard drive. I'll always be grateful to whoever designed the wonderful, and logical, file structure used in Linux. He is, beyond any doubt, a scholar and a gentleman. Also, for those that don't know, Linux Mint makes it easy to bypass the "You can't copy this file because you don't have access, so there." error message. Once backups were made, I booted from an Ubuntu 14.04 thumb drive, reinstalled, and copied everything back. All is well, and everything is back to its happy self. I post this not as a real complaint, just as a cautionary tale to those who might forget to backup before the update.