Online Distribution upgrade does not work. as expected

[MAHillsgrove]

I have two machines that were at 10.04, one several years older than the other. I decided to update the older machine first and it took several hours but really came off without any unexpected problems. So, I gave it two weeks to check the stability before proceeding to the next machine, the one I care most about. :cool:

The new machine is an AMD 8-Core with a high end NVidia card. I only use NVidea. Normally I expect to upgrade and have to reload the drivers, but in each case things went perfectly video wise. My problem is that on the new machine - named Miki - it dropped the network card totally. The only error I can see in the upgrade involved ncurses, but that should not have impacted either picking up the network card itself or using the previous settings.

Is there a way to run the upgrade/reinstall from CD without formatting the disk? I did get a clean and recent backup of data just before the upgrade (paranoia) but I would rather not reinstall the universe if I could help it. The NIC worked perfectly for months, and during the upgrade (obviously), but whatever happened screwed up the NIC?

[Snowhog]

Knowing what your system has for a Network controller would be useful here.

[woodsmoke]

You might try getting everything exactly to your liking and then run Remastersys which will make a full and complete iso of the system and that way you will only have to do any interim upgrades on the next install.

I used to do that regularly but have not lately because the systems are so stable.

Remastersys wil also make a "backup" that you can install on a non-tweaked OS.

Presently, when I see the "updater" arrow in the panel, I just do sudo update and then sudo upgrade.

woodsmoke

[MAHillsgrove]

Update. Problem appears to be the new Linux Kernal. Since the Distrobution upgrade went so poorly and a great number of packages were broken, I tried to repair these and got the machine into an unbootable state. Not a problem really, I decided to freshly install 12.04 from CD. The sustem went to an initial flash screen on the Kubuntu 12.04 CD and then went to a white screen where I caw the carrot under the white haze. My guess is an X11 issue with an NVidea 550 card.

Assuming a bad boot CD, I tried another, same result. I tried a different video card - still based on the NVidia 550 chip set - (it runs X-Plane 10 well) and same result. Ok, so it tried a Mint 13 DVD and it did the same thing. Mint is still Debian, in fact just a derivitive of Ubuntu so next I tried openSUSE 11.

OpenSUSE 11 booted like a champ. It's based on a different set of assumptions, so the problem may be either the age of the kernal or driver choice during the automated instalation. This being the case, I'm downloading openSUSE 12.1 (never had much luck with SUSE before - but that was before I was linux experienced) and Fedora 17. I'll try both and report back. I'll also try booting 10.04, and I'm betting it will work. The problem is 12.04 and that new kernal if that is the case.

{10.04 booted perfectly}

As far as NIC's are concerned, I had trouble with the ethernet on the GIGABYTE 990 FX mainboard (8 core AMD and 16 Gig memory) so I stuck in a cheap $12 10/100 Fastethernet cars and it worked perfectly under 10.04 without so much as a driver load. It saw it and used it without flinching.

This isn't the first time I've had trouble with an online dist upgrade. This time I quadruple backed up the data so while an irritant, it isn't life threatening.

The good news is that I back up all data on at least 4 other computers or drives as well as DVD so the data is not an issue.