[PLUG] System won't boot after failed upgrade from Ubuntu 23.10 to 24.04

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

(I posted a version of this email to ubuntu-users a short time
ago. Hopefully with the collected knowledge of them and PLUG I can
recover my system!)

Hi,

I tried to upgrade my desktop box from Ubuntu 23.10 to 24.04 today and
it failed. It ran out of disk space on /usr midway through the
install, leaving things in a weird state. I was able to run `apt
upgrade` and install a large number of packages, but several 100 more
were still in a state where they were being held. I tried doing
another `apt do-release-upgrade`, but by that point it thought it was
already on 24.04 and so it returned immediately.

At this point I tried rebooting to see if that would clear things up,
That was a mistake. Not it's not booting up. If gets pretty far into
the boot process then fails. The messages scroll off the screen and I
can't see all of them.. The last one says

Failed to start svscan.service - Daemontools service scanner.
See 'systemctl status svscan.service' for details.

(I can't get to a login prompt so I can't actually run that command to
see details.)

Above that I see that dbus.service failed to start. And above that I
see a bunch of failed dependencies for half a dozen SSSD responder
sockets. I'm not able to scroll up beyond that.

I do nightly backups so with any luck I haven't lost any data. Is
there any way I can get back in there in single user mode and have it
finish the upgrade to 24.04? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Walt
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