[Bug 36849] Re: initrd creation error ignored => unbootable system

[Reuben Firmin]

I had a very similar problem. dist-upgrade, failed somewhere during the setup of updates (before the initrd was setup), but no error message was surfaced by synaptic (and presumably therefore by dpkg). 

On reboot, I had a dead system (can't find root drive); I logged in using an older kernel and got a basically functional shell (although many things were not working, e.g. network, because of the many things that hadn't yet been configured) and ran update-initramfs on the new kernel. Once that was done I was able to reboot and get X up, and get back into synaptic. It told me there was a broken package (some braille thing) which I just removed; and it was only at this point that I realized that dpkg had work left to do (it picked right up where it had left off, and configured the rest of everything). The cause of the failure was that my /var partition was full, as above.

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initrd creation error ignored => unbootable system
https://launchpad.net/bugs/36849