Upgrade 8.04->9.10 fails: crash to tty, claims can't mount rootfs

[Dexter Filmore]

So today I finally decided to upgrade to 9.10 from 8.04. 
Updates rolled in, I adapted config files, then had a minor annoyance with 
powernowd hanging during cleanup, killed the subprocess, update went on.

Now after rebooting the system crashed to a maintenance shell claiming the 
system wasn't able to mount the root fs.
Funny thing here: / was mounted. could perfectly dive into the system, run 
programs and so on. Perfectly mounted.
Next thing /home and /var (which I have on seperate partitions) were mounted 
according to "mount", diving into the dirs however they were empty.

Checked blkid and compared to menu.lst (wasn't 9.10 supposed to upgrade to 
grub2beta? No trace of grub.cfg there), all fine, /proc/cmdline fine, but 
couldn't boot.
"runlevel" reports: unknown (scary, huh?)

I suspect an Upstart conflict here, maybe the cleanup left some old sysVinit 
scripts or an initrd wasn't properly updated and Upstart mounted / and sysV 
unmounted it after /home and /var where mounted, effectively breaking them.

Well, I dd'ed back my backups of 8.04 which I created in anticipation of such 
imponderabilites and that's where I am right now.

Any pointers what went wrong here? Anyone else got this? Any remedies?

Dex


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