Upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10 made system non-bootable

[GRobLewis]

When I power on my Dell Dimension 4600i, I hit F12 to get a menu of devices to boot (otherwise it will just boot Windows XP).
I select the main hard drive, and I get the bootloader menu. The first item on the list is Ubuntu, and this used to work fine.

Until I upgraded Ubuntu from 12.04 to 12.10. Now it thinks for a few seconds, the screen goes black, and ... nothing.

I'm a fairly experienced user but I'm clueless when it comes to Linux and dual-boot systems. How can I get my Ubuntu back?

[ibjsb4]

Sorry for the bad news, but you should not of done this. If you manage to get this repaired you would then need to upgrade to 13.04 which has already reached EOL.

Instead you should of gone from 12.04 direct to 14.04 and bypass those releases. All LTS releases can upgrade direct to the next LTS.

[mörgæs]

This hardware will perform better with Lubuntu. A fresh install of 14.04 is worth considering.
When you have that running you don't have to think of upgrades for three years.

[GRobLewis]

Thanks, sounds good. If only I knew how to do a fresh install on the Linux partition. Is it something I can do from Windows XP, which still works on the system? Do I need to burn an install DVD or something?

Also, for my purposes I don't really have any complaints about how Ubuntu was performing. I have 1.5GB RAM and have upgraded the on-board graphics with a Radeon 9800 XT card.

[oldfred]

I find on my laptop with only 1.5GB of RAM that I can run full Ubuntu but it is slow. So I install fallback/flashback which is somewhat like the old gnome2 menus with top & bottom panels. But laptop is old and only has Intel internal chip so you video card may help a lot.

You need to download a new Ubuntu 14.04 and create a DVD or flash drive intaller.
Also instructions for DVD or USB flash drive
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download


Over install without formatting to reuse same home data. "Dirty Install"
System settings or anything in / may be overwritten with defaults. Good backups still important
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuReinstallation
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1941872

Is this a two drive system? If so better to use Something Else or manual install and choose to install grub to MBR of Ubuntu drive and set that as default boot in BIOS.


Install to external drive. Also any second drive.
Also shows combo box with location of grub2 boot loader
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing
And you want this screen to choose where to install the grub2 boot loader which is only available with Something Else or manual install
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Gr...ing_Else.22.29:
Installer version has not changed much so still a good guide except I do not recommend the separate /boot for most systems. Older systems may need it. And some with very large / (root) partitions. BIOS/MBR not for UEFI
http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/07/23...2-hard-drives/

[GRobLewis]

OK, I downloaded 14.04 and made a bootable USB stick from it. Booting that, I chose to install Ubuntu "alongside" my other OSes. It all seems to work, the bootloader lets me boot it, but I can't figure out (a) where it actually got installed (i.e., which partition), and (b) what happened to my existing install of Ubuntu 12.04.

If it simply overwrote my previous Ubuntu I can live with that, though it seems odd it never asked me for permission to do this. And I was never offered the option of a "dirty" install that would preserve my existing user directory.

Right now, Unity is showing 3 drives: WinPATA (the original hard drive partition for this machine), WinSATA (a partition on new drive I added and installed Windows on) and "270 GB Volume", which I presume is where Ubuntu lives, but how can I tell?

[sudodus]

I'm not happy with the 'Alongside' install options. Instead I recommend to select the option 'Something else' and have 'full freedom' to create and or select partitions to use, which was also recommended by oldfred.

You can tell from the output of the following terminal windows commands

sudo parted -l

sudo blkid

df

If you want help to interpret the output, cut and paste it into a reply. Select Advanced, mark the text lines and click on the # icon at the top of the editing window to surround the text lines with code tags. In other words, please post the output between code tags like this

[code]
output
[/code]

to get output like this

output

[GRobLewis]

The output from sudo parted -l:

Model: ATA ST340014A (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 40.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos


Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
 1      32.3kB  32.9MB  32.9MB  primary  fat16        diag
 2      32.9MB  35.5GB  35.5GB  primary  ntfs         boot
 3      35.5GB  40.0GB  4458MB  primary  fat32




Model: ATA WDC WD5000AAKX-0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos


Number  Start   End    Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      32.3kB  210GB  210GB   primary   ntfs            boot
 2      210GB   218GB  8000MB  primary   linux-swap(v1)
 3      218GB   488GB  270GB   primary   ext3
 4      488GB   500GB  12.4GB  extended
 5      488GB   500GB  12.4GB  logical   ext4

Output from sudo blkid:

/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="07D4-071E" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sda2: LABEL="WinPATA" UUID="B2FC3901FC38C201" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sda3: LABEL="DellRestore" TYPE="vfat" 
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="WinSATA" UUID="B2FC3901FC38C201" TYPE="ntfs" 
/dev/sdb2: UUID="4e78b4d5-a83b-4d44-83d4-754494d4ac92" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sdb3: UUID="72fb0764-dd96-462e-89c1-f66008befff3" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sdb5: UUID="e669334c-d847-41fc-8d62-d9bf15dd7786" TYPE="ext4"

Output from df:

Filesystem     1K-blocks    Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb5       11782436 5101516   6059352  46% /
none                   4       0         4   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev              762708       8    762700   1% /dev
tmpfs             154448    1072    153376   1% /run
none                5120       0      5120   0% /run/lock
none              772228   19356    752872   3% /run/shm
none              102400      28    102372   1% /run/user

Thanks for your help.

[GRobLewis]

Notes on the above:
1. /dev/sda is the original 40GB Windows XP ATA drive that came with the Dell
2. /dev/sdb is a 500GB SATA drive that I added. It also has Win XP on it, and it had the earlier (12.04) Ubuntu release. Partitions 4 and 5 on it appear to point to the same space, which IIRC I left unallocated when I partitioned the drive.
3. As you can see, I also defined an 8GB Linux swap partition but have never attempted to use it. Is this a worthwhile thing to do? Where can I find out how?
4. Where is my new 14.04 Ubuntu? And do I still have 12.04?

[GRobLewis]

Examining the above, I'm starting to think that installing 14.04 took over the unallocated 12.4GB at the end of the SATA drive, formatted it ext4, and installed Ubuntu there. Assuming I'm right, that's certainly not what I wanted. How can I move the install back to overwrite 12.10 on /dev/sdb3?