Upgrade crashed...now can't even boot up machine :[

[DaveInFL]

Oh woe is me

I was running 13.10 (maybe 13.14..not sure), anyhow the upgrade to 14.x had been around for a while so today I decided to upgrade. Wish I hadn't. Somewhere along the way the upgrade process crashed. I left the machine for hours but nothing happened. All I could do was reboot. The machine now does not reboot and there are message like:

[1.474412] Kernel panic - not syncing. VFS: Unable to mount root fs o unknown-block(0,0)

I think the root partition is totally barfed. Is there even any way to try and salvage this? It took me a while to get 13.x working how I wanted, including things like backuppc.
Before I move forward just looking for advice on things I can try out.
I guess if the worse comes to the worse I will just have to try and install 14.x manually and start the re-config process again.

[DaveInFL]

Ok, more information to add to this!

I can boot into version 13.11.0-20. That isn't the latest version I had installed, but I can boot into it. If I try and boot into the latest version I can the above Kernel Panic message.
What is weird though is that even though I choose 13.11.0-20 when the machine is booting up it does show 14.0.4! So, it looks like part of the upgrade worked, but perhaps I am in limbo now! If I go into the upgrade manager it doesn't show any upgrades. Perhaps it thinks it's at 14.0.4 even though he upgrade didn't finish.

Really not sure where to go from here at all, so any help would be much appreciated, and if I can avoid doing a clean install the better

I do notice that in /etc/init.d there are a bunch of files with .dpkg-new, which doesn't look too good does it?

[oshunluvr]

Well, in theory, you should be able to do dpkg --configure -a and it will continue where it left off.

[DaveInFL]

Thanks, it did seem to carry on...perhaps got a few minor issues but the computer does boot up normally now

So, how can I really tell if I have 14.0.4 installed? It shows when booting and when shutting down, but there has to be a better way to determine that the upgrade finished 100%.

[oshunluvr]

Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

This will check for new packages and install everything needed. If you just want to verify you got the upgrade, type:

lsb_release -r

and you should see 14.04

[HalationEffect]

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade

Fixed that for you

[kubicle]

Fixed that for you

Actually, you didn't...with apt 1.0 you can use oshunluvr's command as it were...however yours won't work (full-upgrade only works with apt, not apt-get)...so

sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
or
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

lsb_release -r isn't really reliable, though, it really only tell you that "base-files" package is upgraded to trusty.

I'd do:
sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt -f install
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

dpkg is fairly dependable when upgrade gets interrupted, it'll usually recover quite well as oshunluvr mentioned.

[HalationEffect]

Apologies, it appears I'm a little behind the times!

Didn't realise that a new version of Apt had been released last month.

(Edit: 16 years from initial release to the release of version 1.0... I wonder if that's some kind of record?)

[oshunluvr]

...and apt has nicer looking output (read "uses color") than apt-get.

One thing they've left out is autoremove. You still have to use apt-get for that. I prefer the CLI for updating, so I use aliases to make it easier. Like these"

alias aptlist='sudo apt list'
alias aptsearch='sudo apt search'
alias aptshow='sudo apt show'
alias install='sudo apt install'
alias remove='sudo apt remove'
alias update='sudo apt update'
alias upgrade='sudo apt full-upgrade'
alias aremove='sudo apt-get autoremove'
alias dconfig='sudo dpkg --configure -s'