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View Full Version : [all variants] 7.01 to 8.04 upgrade disaster-back to being a noob!



joshjani
May 6th, 2008, 10:14 AM
I've been using 7.01 sparingly on a basement PC for a while now, but haven't done much since initially getting everything running. All's been well with 7.01, until I tried to upgrade via update manager. There was a message in update manager telling me that 8.04 was available, so I tried the upgrade button. A whole mess o' updates were found and downloaded, but then I got a message saying that update manager couldn't be updated, upgrade will abort, machine may be in unusable state. I rebooted, thinking a restart might help, and then tried just installing the 667 updates that update manager found, rather than hitting the upgrade button. (Oh, BTW, now I was getting a message saying that I could do a partial upgrade, but the same error message eventually occurred)

Anyway, allowing the 667 updates seemed to be working, until I rebooted, expecting a nice fresh updated 8.04. Instead, I never got to the initial splash screen- I got scrambled video noise instead, and could not start Ubuntu at all.

That's where I am- nowhere. I would love to just start from scratch and overwrite everything on the Ubuntu partition with a new 8.04 installation, but when I try the live CD install, I amonly offered to resize the partition and use the resulting space. I don't want that many partitions and two installs of Ubuntu.

I feel like a complete noob again, as I can't figure out how to just have XP/Hardy dual boot, 8.04 being in place of 7.01

inportb
May 6th, 2008, 10:17 AM
If you absolutely must use a guided partitioning plan, choose the one that nukes the whole disk. Yes, there is such an option. Otherwise, I think manual partitioning is an excellent idea, because that lets you make a separate /home partition and whatnot.

joshjani
May 6th, 2008, 11:50 AM
If you absolutely must use a guided partitioning plan, choose the one that nukes the whole disk. Yes, there is such an option. Otherwise, I think manual partitioning is an excellent idea, because that lets you make a separate /home partition and whatnot.

I don't have to use a guided partitioning plan- I certainly can manually partition, but I don't want to nuke the whole disk- just the partition where Ubuntu is.

Essentially, I want to erase 7.01 and install 8.04 where 7.01 used to be.
I just need help figuring out how to do that...remember, I'm a noob again!

pelago
May 6th, 2008, 01:45 PM
Just a hint, I expect you mean 7.10, not 7.01. This might matter if you do searching, for example.

joshjani
May 6th, 2008, 03:21 PM
Just a hint, I expect you mean 7.10, not 7.01. This might matter if you do searching, for example.

Ack! You're right---I even went back and transposed that on purpose.

I do indeed mean 7.10->8.04

As an update- I downloaded the alternate CD and may try to do a fresh install, IF I can figure out how to do so w/o messing up my dual-boot.

I feel kinda stupid- I should have paid more attention to updating and actually using the OS before I tried to upgrade.

confused57
May 6th, 2008, 03:52 PM
Ack! You're right---I even went back and transposed that on purpose.

I do indeed mean 7.10->8.04

As an update- I downloaded the alternate CD and may try to do a fresh install, IF I can figure out how to do so w/o messing up my dual-boot.

I feel kinda stupid- I should have paid more attention to updating and actually using the OS before I tried to upgrade.
This guide has some excellent screenshots of the alternate install cd:
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/

You shouldn't have any trouble installing 8.04 on the same partition that you had 7.10. Select Manual partitioning, then you should see a list of your partitions on your hard drive(s). Highlight the one with 7.10, press "enter", then format as ext3, select the mountpoint as /, primary or logical(depending on what it is currently). Check out some of the screenshots in the above guide, before you install, just to get an idea of what you'll need to do.

Bablefish
May 6th, 2008, 04:05 PM
If all else fails you can aways reinstall 7.01 even if you don't have the disc I know where it can be downloaded from

knitmom
May 7th, 2008, 04:37 PM
I tried to do that too and it is still messed up..... grrrrr
Knitmom

fixitdude
May 7th, 2008, 05:56 PM
Tell us more about this basement PC, is it a old CPU, low RAM? Is it possible you ran out of disk space on / ?

joshjani
May 8th, 2008, 04:09 AM
Tell us more about this basement PC, is it a old CPU, low RAM? Is it possible you ran out of disk space on / ?

Nah- it IS old, but I have a PIII 1Ghz CPU, 80GB HDD split in two with Windows XP Home happily running on the other partition.

I had good luck installing 8.04 from the alternate CD. Well, semi-good luck. I now have a screen resolution of only 640x480, which is all but unusable, but that's a post for another thread, I guess!