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

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

On Mon, May 27, 2024 at 06:49:55AM -0400, Walt Mankowski via plug wrote:
> As for the backups, yes, I have them, but the reinstall won't be
> easy. For one thing, my case isn't easy to work on. For another, both
> the smallish SSD and the big HHD are both RAIDed. Even to expand /usr
> is going to be tricky, since I had a hard time getting that setup 6
> years ago and I don't remember now how I did it.
> 
> I suppose I could replace the old RAIDed SSDs with a single much
> bigger SSD, then either restore to that or do a fresh install of
> Ubuntu onto it.
> 
> Or I could spend a few $100 and get a brand new box, and restore to
> that instead.

I ended up doing a combination of all of this. I spent about $400 on a
new box and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 24.04. I was able to restore
most of my data from my backups, but it turned out I wasn't backing up
a lot of the data that was on my big RAID 1 array. (I know, I know,
don't judge me.)

So last week I pulled one of the drives from my old dead machine and
put it in a drive enclosure. It was a little tricky mounting it
because it had also been LVMed as well as RAIDed, but it wasn't as bad
as I feared and in about 10 minutes of Googling I had it mounted.

I'm getting warnings about once a day that I'm running a degraded RAID
array, but aside from that it's working great. Thanks again to
everyone who offered help and encouragement.

The computer I ended up getting is a Beelink mini-pc. It's really
tiny -- maybe the size of 2-3 slices of Wonder Bread -- but comes with
a bunch of ports and is quite peppy. My config with a 500 GB SSD and
32 GB of RAM came to under $400 with shipping.

It ships with Win11 Pro but Ubuntu installed easily. There's a known
issue with the Wifi drivers, but it didn't affect me since I'm using
wired ethernet. (There's a workaround online.) I'm happy with it so
far and at that price point I'm thinking of buying another to have a
proper Win11 box for my ham radio adventures.

Walt
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