[nylug-talk] Boot Failure after Attempted Ubuntu Upgrade

[Kevin Mark]

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On Sun, Nov 05, 2006 at 09:19:39AM -0500, James Keenan wrote:
> I am seeking suggestions as to how to respond to the following  
> problem:  I am unable to restart my computer following an attempted  
> upgrade in Ubuntu.
> 
> I have been using Ubuntu for about 7 months.  I know I started with  
> Hoary and I *thought* I had upgraded to Breezy.  But I can't be  
> certain of that, as my /etc/apt/sources.list continued to show me at  
> Hoary.

Ok. so you are running hoary.

> 
> In any event, yesterday I decided to upgrade to Edgy, jumping over  
> Dapper Drake. 

Debian only supports upgrading to the next stable. AFAIK, ubuntu does
too. So, it you wanted to do that, you'd upgrade to breezy and then to
edgy. Changing you sources.list along the way.

> That upgrade didn't go so well, I got reports of  
> broken packages, etc.  I think that one of the error reports made  
> reference to 'initramfs'.  The upgrade did not succeed.

There may have been changes to how the boot process works with the
kernel: grub,kernel,initrd combo. Debian had similar issue and upgrade
problems.

> 
> At that point I figured it would be better to just go up one step.  I  
> googled and learned that if I edited my etc/apt/sources.list file, I  
> could target the distribution I wanted (Breezy) and then install it  
> with a couple of
> apt-get commands:  apt-get install and apt-get dist-upgrade.
> 
> This worked fairly well.  The apt-get dist-upgrade command completed  
> without listing any errors.  I saw the expected directory structure  
> at my terminal and my desktop was as expected.  I could ssh to other  
> servers where I do work and I had Internet access.

Yes. that is the recommomended way. and seems to have worked, mod a few
nagging bits.

> 
> The only problem was that when I clicked on the new Thunderbird icon  
> to look at my mail, I got a message that said that another instance  
> of Thunderbird was running and that I would either have to shut that  
> process off or restart.  This was puzzling, because I had closed  
> Thunderbird before starting the upgrade to Breezy.
> 
> I figured this would be an appropriate point to restart my computer,  
> and went to do so in the normal manner.  The Dell splash was normal  
> and the first lines of the reboot (which I think refer to Grub) came up.
> 
> Then, all of a sudden, I got the following:
> 
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> segmentation fault
> 
> ALERT!  /dev/sda1 does not exist.  Dropping to a shell!
> Busy Box v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-2 ubuntu 3) Built-in shell (ash)
> Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
> 
<snip>
Hi Jim, 
The main thing to do is to get the live cd and boot from that. then
chroot to the drive. Then try to reinstall grub. There may be some
rebuilding of initramfs or initrd or such. I'm not famililar with the
details. The ubutbu folks (e.g. in the forums or #ubuntu) maybe helpful
if folks here dont come up with the magic.

Cheers,
Kev
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