12.04 upgrade failed- now the system is read-only

[atmasphere]

I made the mistake of going from 10.04 to 12.04 (IMO the Upgrade button should not be made available if the system is more than one level behind the level of the upgrade...).

So the upgrade failed and I further complicated things by not backing up the system.

Now I have a dead machine and can't sort out a way to get my files off the disk drive. The system does a partial boot (splash page) and then gives me one of three options, the only one that does anything is (M)Manual Recovery which drops me to a shell.

That is where I discovered that the entire file system is now read-only and can't be reset, so I can't create a directory as a mount point for the USB (which I can't use anyway as it does not appear in fstab or mtab, both of which are read-only and can't be changed...).

I am thinking the only way out of this is to get a new hard drive, pull the old drive out, do a fresh installation from an install disk, and then reinstall the old drive as a slave and transfer the files in my home directory.

Before I go and do this, does anyone see another way out of this??

Thanks!

[Bashing-om]

just a maybe ...but worth a try; GParted from the live cd.

Make sure nothing is mounted (unmount in GParted), right click on one partition at a time choose check ...that starts e2fsck to automagically repair the file system.

hth <==BDQ

[jerrrys]

And if that (or whatever else you try) doesn't work, you can use the live CD to retrieve your files.

http://www.googlubuntu.com/results/?...lubuntu.com%2F

[steeldriver]

What do you mean by "can't be reset"? it's normal afaik for the root shell of the recovery console to mount the system read-only, but you should be able to remount with read-write permissions provided there's no file system damage

# mount -o remount,rw /

Does that execute OK or are there errors?

[NikTh]

I made the mistake of going from 10.04 to 12.04 (IMO the Upgrade button should not be made available if the system is more than one level behind the level of the upgrade...).

IMO the problem of upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 is that lot of things changed. Libraries , Environment ... etc . The most common problem is breakage of python.

The option exists cuz both versions (10.04 and 12.04) are LTS.
I assume that in near future , upgrade from 12.04 LTS to 13.04 LTS will be safe.

My suggestion for your problem is what @jerrrys mentioned. Retrieve your files with a LiveCD and make a new-fresh install.

Thanks