kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

[udippel]

What I get after a botched upgrade (power went off during download(?)):
Even in 'recovery' I get after some 2 seconds
"The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present"
It as, according to fdisk
I can even fsck.ext4 -f /dev/sda6 it, no problem
mount says:
/dev/sda6 on /
but also
/etc/mtab is not writeable and I should look at /proc/mounts
According to /proc/mounts is actually isn't mounted
Though when I mount it manually, it says it is already mounted.

That's the end of the line for me. Now I hope someone can shed a light on what is going on, and more so, how to get out of this situation, if possible, without a complete reinstall.

Thanks in advance,

Uwe

[udippel]

[Solved] kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 sec

"Solved" ... in quotes ...

Fortunately,
at the recovery session, with Manual, I could
mount -o remount, rw /
and then
dpkg --configure -a

This doesn't sort all problems, but at least, reboot brought me to a console (no X).
Another
dpkg --configure -a
(no, in the Manual session of above it did not do any better)
brought back some more packages; still no X

... though at least, this current problem is solved.

[KeithZG]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

I assume afterwards you've done a "sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude upgrade" to make sure you've got everything upgraded fully? Unfortunately, X not starting is a problem that could stem from countless potential issues. I'd make sure, firstly, that kubuntu-desktop is installed (astonishingly, that solved a problem I had during an upgrade years back). Also, what graphics drivers are/were you using? Quite possible that the answer would lie there in some way or another.

[udippel]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

Yes, I did a number of those. Until everything was fine.
I also did some sudo apt-get autoremove and sudo apt-get autoclean.

The X-thingy took me another 3 hours, and had nothing to make with the interrupted update. And it could as well have thrown another convert back to Windows, naturally:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rs/+bug/537218
It is an almost 3 year old bug, and strangely it hit me only at this upgrade 10.10 to 11.04: There is

[ 17.706] (II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "nvidia-auto-select"
[ 17.878] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to allocate primary buffer: out of memory.
[ 17.878] (EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
[ 17.905]
Backtrace:
[ 17.906] 0: /usr/bin/X (xorg_backtrace+0x26) [0x4a2626]
[ 17.906] 1: /usr/bin/X (0x400000+0x6219a) [0x46219a]

not enough video memory.

The remedy is illogical: /etc/default/grub needed
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nopat"
for the Nvidia-driver to work.

[I guess I won't be the only one hitting this, therefore the detail]

Though once done, the efforts bring the reward: the interface is really nice!

[KeithZG]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

This is why it's annoying that NVIDIA refuses to open-source their graphics drivers, ridiculous problems like this But good to know that you found a fix!

[udippel]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

I agree with you 50/50. Thumbs up for the 50 for the Nvidia-problem. Thumbs down for another ridiculous bug that has been know for more than a year, 'critical' and 'triaged':
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...rs/+bug/537218
There is no closed software. It is all free software that some hare-brained designer (I guess, rather than coder) has screwed up. It does need a quantity of brain below some already low limit to start an upgrade process by destroying the ability to boot, and only make the system bootable again towards the very end of the process.
Look at the first post, that was the underlying reason for the whole mess to start.

Thanks nevertheless for your care and kindness!

[mtek]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

I get the exact same fail as the first message in this thread. I can execute the mount etc. but no updating or upgrading can happen as the network "is unreachable".

How do I connect to the network from the maintenance shell??

Thanks.

[udippel]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

You don't.
You do the dpkg --configure -a until it is happy, then you reboot. Now you should at least get a command line (try 'recovery' if you can get there). Try startx, eventually, whatever, until you get some networking (you might have to use cable, that usually works out of the box, if you encounter problems with X).

[mtek]

Re: kubuntu upgrade 10.10 to 11.04 borked - boot stops after around 2 seconds

Thanks. I eventually was able to boot an older version on another partition (10.04). Then I upgraded that to 10.10 and then I upgraded that to 11.04. I'll just burn a cd to load 11.04 onto the damaged partition.


What a disastrous upgrade!! I would have been screwed without that older partition.