help upgrade from 12.04 LTS to 12.10 Frozen

[absolute beginner]

Help while upgrading from 12.04 LTS to 12.10 using the muon app the upgrade froze. It appeared to have frozen while trying to upgrade dropbox.

It sat on 53% for a very long time and then through my fiddling stupidtiy is seems that I cancelled the upgrade. Now I am scared to turn off the PC and restart it.

Now whe I ty to restart the upgrade process I get the error message "Cannot get the exclusive lock on the packaging backend. Please close any other legacy packaging tools that may be open" As far as I can see the only other thing open on my PC is my firefox browser.

The PC is still workable but I do not want to turn it off incase I can not get it to reboot successfully.

Can anyone recommend what I should do at this stage?

[absolute beginner]

From a terminal session I tried Sudo apt-get update and got the following

liamv@liamv-desktop:~/Documents$ sudo apt-get update
[sudo] password for liamv:
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?
liamv@liamv-desktop:~/Documents$ ^C

Does this imply that the some part of the upgrade is still in process somewhere and I may be able to kick start it?

[vinnywright]

try removing the lock files

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/list/lock && sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dpkg/lock

you may allso half to remove the /var/cache/apt/archives/lock in the same manner and then restarting the upgrade ,,,,,,,,however the upgrader dose not know how to handel therde party packages some times (dropbox) so this may be why it froze
or your / ran out of space ,,,, check this with

df -h

VINNY

[absolute beginner]

liamv@liamv-desktop:~/Documents$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/list/lock && sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dpkg/lock

liamv@liamv-desktop:~/Documents$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 73G 18G 52G 26% /
udev 712M 4.0K 712M 1% /dev
tmpfs 289M 836K 288M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 722M 92K 722M 1% /run/shm

Thanks Vinny.
Looks like memory is not my problem.

[absolute beginner]

Vinny I have just tried to start the upgrade again and I still get the error message:

"Cannot get the exclusive lock on the packaging backend.
Please close any other legacy packaging tools that may be open."

[absolute beginner]

Has anyone got some further suggestions?

[bweinel]

You might take a look at this thread related to this issue in KPackageKit:

http://www.icantinternet.org/2011/06...xclusive-lock/

It points to apt possibly not having the correct gpg key signature rather than a locking file issue.

cheers,
Bill

[absolute beginner]

You might take a look at this thread related to this issue in KPackageKit:

http://www.icantinternet.org/2011/06...xclusive-lock/

It points to apt possibly not having the correct gpg key signature rather than a locking file issue.

cheers,
Bill

Bill that looks like that could have been good advice but before I received it I tried a reboot....and my machine won't reboot now.

I get the message:

stopping Mount network filesystems. [OK]
starting Sambda Winbind spooled/server [OK]

...and then it just freezes.

I can reboot in safe mode and drop to root shell prompt, but I don't know what to do from here. It seems I have gone from 'bad' to 'panic now'

I don't wantto lose the data stored on my hard drive.

Can anyone suggest what to try next?

[vinnywright]

at the root shell try

do-release-upgrade -d

and tell what happens.

VINNY

[absolute beginner]

at the root shell try

do-release-upgrade -d

and tell what happens.

VINNY

Many thanks for the help guys.

I typed:

do-release-upgrade -d

At the root@liamv-desktop:~# prompt

And got

"Checking for a new Ubuntu release"

But nothing else has happened since.

[vinnywright]

did it return the prompt or seem to just get stuck checking for a new release.........?

VINNY

[absolute beginner]

did it return the prompt or seem to just get stuck checking for a new release.........?

VINNY

Vinny, no it did not return the prompt. but if I hit the enter button the screen scrolls up one line so the machine hasn't locked.

When I interrupt after several minutes on in action usin control+c I get the message

^Cmkdir() failed: [Errno 30] Read only file system: '/root/.cache/update-r-core' 'Traceback (most recent call last):
File "user/bin/do-release-upgrade", line 144, in <module>
time.sleep (0. 5)

[absolute beginner]

Just for the hell of it.

I tried

Sudo dpkg --configure -a

I got the error message

Unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system

Is my first hurdle in resolving this issue to change the file system from Read-only?

[absolute beginner]

Seem to have made some progress with the steps below that I found in another forum here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/13151...de-interrupted

Reboot and, in grub menu, select recovery mode, and then, once it loaded menu dropped to a root shell and ran

sudo fsck /dev/sda1)

Result of this was clean.

Then

mount -o remount,rw / && dpkg --configure -a

Then once completed rebooted the PC....

Yay my PC has now booted and loads 12.10!