Upgrade to 18.04 LTS issues, involving systemd

[ashleydrees]

I am running ESXi and trying to upgrade a file/print server from 16.x.lts to 18.x LTS and the upgrade failed. I still have a running system and have not yet rebooted it - i DID run "do-release-upgrade -d" which might be the root of my problem, so if anyone has any wise words for me, i'd be very grateful.

[dino99]

Be sure systemd is completly installed: sudo apt-get install --reinstall systemd udev systemd-sys
Do the same with the metapackage (ubuntu-desktop, or the one you should use) to glance at the possible missing packages

Run the sleaning scripts: clean/autoclean/autoremove
Check the sources.list, and if needed, downgrade to genuine version (via ppa-purge)
And browse the output of 'journalctl -b' to find 'warnings (bright lines) & 'errors' (red lines)

[ashleydrees]

Wish i had seen that before i forced a reboot... down to recovery shell now... have to grab a 18.04 LTS ISO and boot into recover.

[ashleydrees]

Ah well. in the recovery shell, i do not have any desktop installed as it is an ESXi guest, it does not find systemd-sys only systemd-sysv but even that will not install.

[ashleydrees]

Ah well, things are a lot worse now, but also better, thanks for your help, the do-release-upgrade did not seem to do much of what i expected and left me with a halfway house upgrade - my sources.list had not been updated to bionic so the whole system was still at xenial no wonder it was having issues. Sadly i did not realise this issue quick enough... serves me right for playing mandolin whilst updating...