[Bug 37430] Re: Crash during breezy->dapper upgrade

[PeteDonnell]

I * think* I managed to get round this problem, although I'm not
entirely sure how. This is roughly what happened:

The upgrade process was started via update-manager. It hung on starting
pcmcia as described by everyone else, and at the same time the keyboard
stopped responding (maybe because I have a USB keyboard?). Mouse input
still worked but all keystrokes failed to produce any output. Luckily I
was still able to log in via ssh from another computer. I was unable to
kill modprobe, which was using 100% CPU according to top, but I managed
to kill the pcmcia rc script. The installation then appeared to
continue, but got stuck on the install of python-2.4 instead.

At this point I had to force the computer to power off, and power back
on. The system booted and seemed to be useable, there were quite a lot
of things that weren't working properly according to the kernel boot
messages, but luckily nothing critical. I tried 'dpkg --configure -a' as
suggested here, but the install just hung at the same place.

Now comes the weird part: since I knew from this page that the problem
was caused by the smp kernel, and I didn't have any other kernels
installed, I thought I'd try and install another kernel. Initially I
tried this via dpkg directly, but then decided to try synaptic. I
selected the non-smp linux 686 package, and marked it for installation.
When I clicked the 'Apply' button, synaptic appeared to go through the
configuration of all the packages that had failed to set up correctly
during the original upgrade. Note that I didn't press the "mark updates"
button in synaptic. This time the packages seemed to configure OK, and
the computer is working again. I haven't done any extensive testing, but
both the old 2.6.12-smp kernel and the new 2.6.15-non-smp kernels I now
have seem to boot OK. I haven't noticed anything untoward in the kernel
boot messages (I have the 'quiet' kernel boot option turned off), and
all the programs I've tried so far seem to be working as they're
supposed to.

No idea if this will help anyone else but I thought I'd share it.

-- 
Crash during breezy->dapper upgrade 
https://launchpad.net/bugs/37430