upgrade failure

[aerospace1028 at hotmail.com]

Greetings,
I seem to have run into trouble upgrading from Ubuntu8.04 to Ubuntu10.04.  The other night, I figured I would try the upgrade process while the internet trafic should be low.

I logged into my administrator account and ran sudo aptitude update followed by sudo aptitude safe-upgrade.  There were about 8 packages that were updated and none listed as "NOT UPGRADABLE."

After the standard update process completed, from the gnome-terminal, I ran sudo do-release-upgrade.  Every thing started off fine.  It took about half an hour to download the necessary packages from the repositories.  I monitored the process for a little while (10-15 minutes) after that: It looked like the standard update messages to me ("preparing to replace package version x with package version y ...").  Since the entire process might take afew hours (Before downloading, it said there were over 600 packages to instal and well over 1,000 to upgrade) I decided to stretch my legs a little and came back to check on the progress every 15-30 minutes.

After about 2 hours, orca stopped speaking and I found a small rectangular dialog box in the middle of the screen.  I wasn't sure if orca just lost focus so first I tried altTabbing to give the dialog focus.  Nothing seemed to happen.  I tried bringing up the run dialog to re-launch orca (I'm still in gnome-2.22, orca randomly stops and I find re-launching it manually appears to work), but the run dialog didn't appear to pop up.

Before I could try anything else, the screen went almost blank.  To me it looked deep blue, and I saw some stuff an the extreme top and bottom of the screen which I assume was the outline of the top and bottom panels.  I wasn't sure what was going on, but the processor sounded like it was still chugging along, so I left everything alone until it slowed down.

When the processor sounded like it stopped cranking, I waited about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.  i switched to text console 1 and logged in.  I connected my braillenote and attempted to launch brltty.  I never recieved any output on the braille display, but I noticed the screen filled with messages.  They kept coming and coming.  Visually, it looked like when I run an update process; They had a little bit of variation in length and some popped up quickly while others took longer before the next message joined the queue.  I hoped the release process was still going.  I stepped back before my impationtce got the better of me.  I came back about every half hour and pressed the control key to reactivate the screen (I'm on a laptop and every thirty or so minutes of inactivity and the screen goes to sleep i guess).

Eventually, the screen appeared to stop scrolling.  All the messages stacked up in columns.  It took another hour before I could get sighted assistance to review what was going on (about 7 hours from the start of do-release-upgrade).  I was getting an infinite loop of messagesstating brltty could't open device.  I had disconnected the braillenote a while back to keep it from getting dropped.  I tried reconnecting it, but it didn't appear to have any effect.  After another 15 or so minutes, I just gave up and pressed the power button on the laptop and killed everything.

When i came back to reboot, I got the regular grub menu (I duel boot with windows XP).  Sighted assistance says the ubunntu entry is 8.04.  When I trie to launch buntu I'm not surprised to get a static screen full of messages.