Re: [PLUG] Problem w/upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 -> 11.10

[sean finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

Hi,

(adding plug back to the recipient list, hope that's okay)

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 07:13:37PM -0400, Adam Zion wrote:
> >I doubt you could have seriously destroyed anything doing that
> 
> Ooooooooooh, yeah. It's dead. Just shows me blinking cursor when I try
> to reboot. I may just sledgehammer the whole blanking thing, the good
> it's doing me.

You have far too little faith in your package management system!
Unless you *also* did an rm -rf / after the ps|xargs kill, I'd say you
still have a perfectly working system hiding behind a mis-configured
kernel/udev/bootloader.  dpkg really is a resilient little beast, you
could pull the power half way through an upgrade and you'd still have
a consistant and fixable system afterwards[1].

The blank screen is probably because grub by default boots your system
in "quiet" mode, i.e. it blanks the screen and hides all those scary,
user-unfriendly kernel messages.  If you have access to the grub boot
menu at boot time (by deafult ubuntu also hides this, i believe), just
remove the "quiet" parameter from the boot options.  Otherwise I believe
it's in /etc/default/grub, and you run update-grub after changing it.

But seriously, if you have the time and interest, take an installation
disk, boot into rescue mode, mount your / filesystem, start a shell (the
alternate installer does a good job hand-holding through this, i don't
know about the live cd).  Once in the shell, run "dpkg --configure -a"
and "apt-get -f install", and see how far you get.



	sean


[1] There was a short period of time, around jaunty, iirc, where you couldn't
    be so sure about that if you were using ext4, because you might end up
	with some zero-sized files, but even that is no longer the case.
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