Ubuntu Installation :: Failed Upgrade 9.10 -> 10.04: System Unbootable
May 4, 2010
I've just reported a launchpad bug report about my desktop system being unbootable after upgrade to lucid lynx. [URL]... I opened this thread to ask if someone else experienced a similar problem and for collecting information and workarounds (none yet) about this quite serius problem. The system has an nvidia graphic card and proprietary drivers were installed before the upgrade. However I'm not sure the problem is related to this. FYI, the system booted regularly from a usb stick with ubuntu lucid lynx. SO the problem is in the upgrade path.
yesterday I performed an automatic security update suggested by the update manager on my virtualized (with VirtualBox on a Windows 7 host) Ubuntu 10.10 installation.
The update somehow failed and left me with an unbootable system. When I try to boot, I am told that various folders, files, and what not are missing. Then the system drops into a busybox and leaves me with an (initramfs) prompt.
This happens with all kernels I get offered by GRUB, although the error messages are quite different from kernel to kernel.
Well, the short of it is this: I don't have the slightest idea on how to get back to a working system and this site is the final straw I'm willing to grab. A complete disaster like this following an update initiated and executed by the system is unheard of in Windows-land; at least I haven't heard of it, yet, and therefore I am going to abandon Ubuntu and Linux altogeteher, if there is no remedy.
I tried running an upgrade from 8.04 LTS to 10.4 last night, and things seemed to be going smoothly. The upgrade progress was nearly complete, and I wandered off for a while to let it run. When I came back, I had nothing but an orange screen and and unresponsive system. I left it alone all night with the hopes that something would happen, but this morning nothing had changed so I hard restarted the system.
Ubuntu 10.4 appears in GRUB, but the system cannot boot and exits with a kernel panic and the message "vfs unable to mount root fs on unknown-block" I was able to boot to a 10.4 LiveCD, and I can browse all of my files from there. What can I do to get this system back up an running? I have dozens of user account and a lot of customization (it acts as a webserver with a wiki for a gaming website running on it, among other things), so I really really don't want to do a fresh install and lose all my data and customizations.
I did a routine update of my ubuntu 10.4 (in wubi vista) to the latest kernel (something -26) and installed a java plugin for firefox. After a reboot, i open up the "Ubuntu" entry and i see a message flash accross the screen (something about hda,0,0 or sda im not sure) then it just reboots the PC. No command line or anything. No need to say im pretty screwed
My question is, is there any way to get my files off of wubi? Or even better can i restore Ubuntu to working again? P.S for some reason the two times i have tried to run a live CD on this laptop, it has corrupted vista.
Suffice to say I had a dual boot at work with an essential windows 7 and non-essential linux install on it, and randomly upgrading the distro made windows7 unbootable. Cue a missed days work, much embarrassment and ear bashing from those who are convinced Linux is written entirely by communists and hippies. In the end I had to re-install windows, which cut off the ability to boot to ubuntu - although I've left the existing ubuntu partitions as they were.
Although I can get away with allocating a few partitions to ubuntu, I can't really justify fiddling with the MBR based upon this experience. I need a fast boot and persistent data for doing anything further with ubuntu at work, so I'm wondering whether a safer bet would be to setup a usb stick with enough grub to boot to the existing ubuntu install? Not a full usb distribution, just enough to boot into the existing install? how this would be doneIs it really just a grub-install /dev/sdXX (where XX is the usb)?
I have had Ubuntu desktop on my PC for a year now and am very happy with it. A couple of months ago I got a Ubuntu server 10.04 for playing about with. I have installed the gui, for personal reasons, but I want to upgrade to 10.10
Whenever I attempt the upgrade my server becomes unbootable and I have to reimage and start again. I have even tried performing the upgrade before I install the GUI but it still makes no difference.
Although I have the GUI I am doing the upgrade via command line.
Upon watching the upgrade in process, I find that no errors are occurring. Could it be something to do with my server provider?
I updated 9.10 and system crashed during update and is now unbootable. It seems to freeze (or is just taking a really long time) at fsck. Is there any way to make my computer usable again without reinstalling the whole OS?
I upgraded from 10.04 to 10.10 a few hours ago using the alternate CD. I selected not to download files off the internet as I wanted to do that at a later stage. After running for close on an hour performing the update, as it reached the end it gave me a message saying the update had failed and the changes will now be restored (or something like that). I clicked ok, and the update window closed. I then restarted the pc and it stopped at the splash screen. Now I cannot get it to load the desktop environment. It Jst sits at the splash screen. Pressing the power button shuts it down normally, but alt-ctrl-f1 does not open a shell.If i start up using recovery mode and then select fail safe graphics mode something comes up about a segmentation fault in xserver in I then end up at the shell where I can work from the command line, but can never get the graphical interface to work.
On my laptop I dual boot Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows XP. During the last upgrade of my Ubuntu distro something went wrong and now I get a messed up GUI. In the meanwhile I got a new laptop on which I only run Ubuntu 9.10. So my question is: I want to delete the linux partition on my old laptop and use only Windows XP but since I use grub to dual boot, I'm afraid that deleting the linux partition and extending the Windows partition will cause problems to boot my computer. Here's a screenshot of my partitions:
I ran the 11.04 upgrade. At the end, it reported a failure, implied a recovery would occur and the upgrade then finished. The recovery was supposed to have run sudo dpkg --configure -a. That does not appear to have happened. I am concerned that a reboot will render my system inoperative.Has anyone else experienced a similar issue or have any suggestions? What information should I provide. report.
I had F10. Today the system suggested to upgrade to F11. In the middle of upgrade (during the installation of files) my computer had frozen for a 10-15 min. I rebooted it. Nothing is working now. I can not boot F10 and upgrade F11 does not want to continue.
My current situation is I have two physical hard disks, one with Windows 7 (sda) and another where I recently installed Ubuntu 9.1 (sdb). At this time there were no issues.
Now after getting used to 9.1 I selected to upgrade to 10.04 from the update manager. During this install I was told I needed to upgrade GRUB which I understand is the bootloader and was told to choose where to install it.Now at this time I had no knowledge of drive naming conventions in Linux and there was no option to cancel the upgrade to look for help, so instead I followed the advice in the help box to simply select every device listed
The result was a fully working Ubuntu installation but at the cost of an unbootable Windows 7.Windows is showing on the GRUB menu but selecting it gives only a blank screen with a flashing cursor and no ability to do anything besides ctrl-alt-delete.
After a few hours of googling solutions including downgrading GRUB, there was no change and it seems that I actually have a version of GRUB on both drives. The one on the windows drive (sda) is the default loaded GRUB that shows Windows 7 but cannot boot it. The second GRUB install on the Ubuntu drive (sdb) is the one I am able to configure through Ubuntu but does not list Windows 7 on its boot list even after using "sudo update-grub"
My mom's computer is no longer bootable. I was thinking of attempting to fix it later on this week and am thinking of doing a chroot and updating via a live CD hoping that an even newer update solves the problem but I have some doubts of success. Does anyone have any information about this issue so that I can be better prepared to fix it? Also, I thought I should mention that I tried the second newest kernel to see if that would make it work. It didn't. The error is something along the lines of having the /dev/diskuuid change. If I'm correct, Ubuntu changed the disk's name and is trying to boot the old name. It's dropping to an initramfs shell (not the regular terminal where you can work miracles ).
I compiled my own custom kernel for the first time. I tinkered with different options, nothing to difficult. I actually didn't expect it to work the first time.
I had kept the original lilo boot config just in case something was to go wrong. Now when I try to boot the system, I always get a "VFS: cannot mount root system on (8,3)". I googled this and found that my kernel did not support my root filesystem (btrfs). So I made an initrd with btrfs kernel module, but it didn't help. I then got a string of errors about how /dev could not be mounted.
My question is two-fold. First, how come when I configure the system back to when it was first installed, it still won't boot? Im using the same kernel (2.6.37.6-smp). Second, how can I get myself out of this rut without reinstalling?
lilo.conf
Code: lba32 append=" vt.default_utf8=0" boot=/dev/sda vga = normal # Linux - Slackware image = /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.37.6-smp root = /dev/sda3 label = Linux read-only
BTW, I have been maintenancing the system by chrooting into the device off of my slackware boot disk. Im on slack 13.37
I tried to upgrade ubuntu from 9.10 to 10.04. It is almost complete downloading packages,but i get this error:Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/poo...untu2_i386.deb The HTTP server sent an invalid Content-Range header [IP: 91.189.88.30 80]I tried to change from main server to US server, but I still get this error.
I have installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha on my computer.was running fine until I installed usplash. Now when I boot up I get a message saying "Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode" and a list of options. When I select any of them and press Enter I get a blank screen. I can't even load a command line. I want to remove usplash to see if that fixes the problem, but I would have to do it from another OS. How could I do that? My other operating systems are Ubuntu Karmic and OpenSUSE.
I use the automatic upgrades - they hardly ever cause a problem... until now.
I just applied this upgrade (linux-image-2.6.32-5-amd64) and a restart was required (normal under when upgrading the image). After the restart my SIP phone software didn't startup - didn't even get any errors in the log file... So I checked the "System Monitor" to see if the process was running but not displayed... the System Monitor generates a core dump...
I hope there will be another update to solve this really quickly.... not sure what else is broken. Firefox is still working and so is Skype.
I've been using Ubuntu since 6.04, not a linux guru by any means but can usually get myself out of trouble.
So, the issue... I installed 8.04 on my mother's laptop some time back as she was having trouble keeping Win 2000 running (she has a low spec no-name generic laptop btw). I live in Autsralia and she in England, i thought i could better support her if she was running Ubuntu... All has been well with 8.04 but with the new LTS release (10.04) i thought i'd talk her through the upgrade... Did the online upgrade via Update Manager, all seemed to go OK but when she went to log on after restart she got an error saying 'authentication failed' even though we are 100% sure we have the user name and password correct... Tried to do a ctrl+alt+F1 to by pass the GUI log on but couldn't get the terminal session to open up, just got a black screen - no command prompt.
So... thought OK re-install... downloaded the ISO, burned and sent her a CD in the post... talked her through the re-install, all seemed to go well (again) - BUT, after restart, couldn't log in "authentication failed" again...
So, remember i'm trying to talk a novice through all this... any thoughts!?!
If i can get her to log in i can then support her via some kind of remote sesion or other screen share... and it wont cost me a small fortune in international calls!!! But if i can't get a log in, i'm dead in the water!?
I have a 4 gig Kingston USB stick. I have an Eee PC with 4 gig internal flash drive (no hard drive). I can't find the specs but I believe it is roughly equivalent to an Eee PC 900 or something.
About a year ago I downloaded the then latest version of ubuntu for netbooks, created a bootable USB drive from my Mac, as per the instructions at:url
or whatever the equivalent site was then. It booted fine, it installed fine and everything was great.
Eventually the tiny flash drive in my EeePC got full. I couldn't upgrade to the new 9.10 distro through auto updates because there wasn't enough room to download them.
I tried to delete some old kernels and then delete some other stuff. I broke my linux installation and now it won't boot to a desktop. I can get a login prompt and I can boot to the fail safe terminal but not much else.
So, I tried repeating the steps above.
I downloaded the NEW version of ubuntu netbook remix from:url
I followed the instructions for making a bootable USB stick from the first link above. I used the EXACT SAME USB stick as last time (in fact, it still had the older version of the ubuntu install files on it).
There were no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it.
I stuck it into my EeePC and rebooted and hit the ESC key and selected the Kingston USB drive to boot from. The light on the USB drive flashed some, then the internal flash drive light flashed some and the EeePC booted from the internal drive.
I rebooted and went into the bios settings and made triple sure that it was set to boot from USB drive first and rebooted. The same thing happened (it "looked at" the USB drive, then booted from the internal drive).
I repeated the above a dozen times. I REinstalled the ubuntu files on the USB drive from my Mac. I repeated. Still the same.
I redownloaded the ubuntu files and did everything from scratch. Again no errors "creating" the USB drive and it can be mounted on my Mac and I can see the files are on it, but again, it is absolutely useless because it is unbootable.
I tried booting my Mac from the USB drive and my Mac didn't recognize it as a bootable drive either.
I found another 4 gig USB drive and repeated the steps above with it. It was exactly the same: no errors creating it, the drive is mountable on my Mac, but it is completely unbootable.
I am at a loss to find any info on this nor do I have any idea what to try next. I KNOW this worked with the first USB drive last year (with an earlier version of ubuntu). What could possibly have changed?
I recently tried to upgrade to 10.04 and it failed somewhere on the installation process. I managed to get the machine to boot and go into gnome but now very few programs will actually launch (terminal, nautilus and firefox is about it) and the install/update software reports al sorts of dependency issues
I had installed Ubuntu 8.04 and partitioned my drive to share 500gB with Windows XP. All was good. When I saw that Ubuntu 10.01 was available I downloaded it to update the 8.04. Ididn't want to have to redo all my configurations so told installer not to update config files. No entry in GRUB no boot. Tried to re-install 8.04 to replace 10.01 and get back to intial state. Current state Ubuntu won;t boot, XP still OK but don't know how to clean up my mess. I've attached a copy of a boot info script I ran.
Code: Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== => Grub 0.97 is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks on the same drive in partition #6 for /boot/grub/stage2 and /boot/grub/menu.lst.
I ran the software manager upgrade/update install of 11.04. When I reboot almost immediately a quick error flashes on screen that says something like "missing prefix" then it goes to an unfamiliar menu with kernel choices that are very old and look nothing like my desktop. I think it may be some old install or something I dont know. I have an eee pc. I originally installed with WUBI but have done other kernel upgrades with no issues.
--Began with an up-to-date Ubuntu 8.04.3--64 LTS install; tar-copied everything from sda2 to sda3 and booted SDA3 so I wouldn't fry my main install:
[[ ' fdisk -l /dev/sda /dev/sdb ' Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x86dae77a
[Code]...
Will attach any logs requested; but I'm about to scrap the failed install and start over, 'cuz I want to test 10.04 LTS and the new Vmware Workstation 7.1--64 beta. The only thing I can think of is that I did not boot into the new kernel ( apt-get upgrade ) before doing the dist-upgrade. I've done a few of these dist-upgrades in the past this way; 6.06-LTS to 8.04, 8.04 to 9.x, etc
I had a failed attempt at an upgrade to 10.04 but I know the error of my ways however before I go through it again does 10.04 still have the tools available for a dial-up connection, wvdial & gnome ppp?
I have an Proliant DL380 that I use as a home server/router that I attempted to upgrade to Lucid. The gui upgrader first attempted to upgrade to 9.10 (as expected.)
I believe grub was incorrectly installed/updated. Not quite sure if grub2 was installed. The machine boots to a maintenance prompt. The partitions seem to be mounted read-only because of errors. The grub menu only shows an 8.04 kernel choice, even though all 9.10 packages were downloaded and, I believe, installed. The gui upgrader did fail with an error right before the "cleaning-up" stage. After "messing around" with it, the upgrader said I needed to reboot. So, I did and my problems started.
I tried booting the 9.10 Kubuntu cdrom and also a Knoppix 6 CD, but neither one would boot properly (gave me a BusyBox prompt.) So, I guess they don't like the Smart Array 6.
what I could try to fix and upgrade to 10.04? I really don't want to lose my configuration files (dhcp, firestarter rules, apache, squirrelmail, NFS, etc.)
Fail to fetch 2 ppa.launchpad.net addresses and another cause the upgrade to terminate. The error messages suggest some type of network error. Should I wait a week and try the upgrade again?
i am an ubuntu nooby, out of curiosity i installed ubuntu 11.04 alpha3 last night. Yes, i will definitely never install an alpha version unless i wish to test it! Frankly said, i first installed 386 version on a notebook which runs just fine. So I thought why not install the 64 bit version on my pc.
Unfortunately, the system did not finish the first reboot in order to complete the installation. First it always stopped at "checking battery state". There, I read that this bug is already fixed: [URL]... I came across this thread: [URL]... So I pressed Alt +F2 in order to log in and performed sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get upgrade. Everytime there was a new update I hoped, that this will fix the issue. But when I shutdown the system with sudo shutdown now -h and restart again there is no progress.The only thing that changed is that the system no stops at "Stopping userspace bootsplash", whatever that means?
I used Kubuntus kpackagekit to upgrade to natty. The process started well, it downloaded everything and started to install 11.04. But then all of a sudden during Installing stage I got this error message:
"Distribution upgrade process exited with code 1"
and
"Your system might be unusable".
And it sure is unusable because after reboot I can only see Kubuntu 10.10 loading screen and
"The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present".
There also are options for either skip mounting or manually mount hard disks. I don't have a clue how to manually mount... I get same message if I try to boot to safe mode. Does this mean I have to go to clean install? I really don't want to do that because last time it took a couple of months to get ubuntu to co-operate well enough with my laptop.
