Upgrade disaster - grub update failed and now my machine won't boot

[Carl Anderson]

David and Ian,

I appreciate the follow-up.  I am quite happy with 10.04 now that I have
arrived there.  I think you should know that the upgrade path is NOT fully
baked in regards to updating GRUB - a crucial piece of the puzzle.

My problem (I think) was that I had two SATA drives and on one of them I had
something like 10 partitions.  I couldn't remember which one was bootable
and there was no indication in the list presented to me which one was.  So
instead of opening a terminal and checking fdisk or mount, I started picking
them in semi-random order until I found something that satisfied the popup
window (I selected the disk entry, not an individual partition).  As a
result I was totally bricked for a day.

Eventually I was able to find *another computer *where I could download and
burn an install CD to boot into my desktop.  From there I tried to fix the
boot partition and only made things worse for myself.  The GUI partition
manger during the install resized one of my large partitions without first
asking me for confirmation.  This wasted a couple hours of my time while I
waited for it to complete (I know better than to interrupt a partition
resize operation - you can imagine this made me very nervous though).

Eventually I was able to figure out how to make things work - I deleted some
of my old partitions and installed a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 there.  All my old
personal data is still sitting there in my old root partition waiting for me
to find a dull afternoon to move it over.  While this is not ideal, at least
I can boot my machine.  On a happy note, the install correctly identified my
old partition and made it available as a boot option for me.

The takeaway here should be:

   - GUI Upgrade - find a way to make the GRUB upgrade portion idiot proof.
   - INSTALL - don't *EVER* resize a user's partition without first popping
   up a confirmation dialog (Good LORD - this was a *major *WTF!!!)

Thanks!

Carl

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:45 AM, David Tombs <cyan.spam at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Carl,
>
> Sorry that your upgrade experience was so terrible. I'm not too familiar
> with GRUB, but I can point you to the options on
> <http://www.ubuntu.com/support> where you may be able to find help. This
> list is not for support discussions and you will probably have better
> luck there.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> On 05/10/2010 01:05 PM, Carl Anderson wrote:
> > Also, I meant to say I went from 9.10 to 10.04, not 9.04.  I had
> > followed the instructions and had just upgraded all my 9.10 packages
> > before doing the 10.04 upgrade...
> >
> > Carl
> >
> > On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Carl Anderson <carl.anderson at gmail.com
> > <mailto:carl.anderson at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     I went through the GUI upgrade from 9.04 to 10.04 last night.  I
> >     habitually keep my machine up to date, so this upgrade was not from
> >     some random or uncommon configuration.
> >
> >     Everything went fine until grub was being installed / upgraded.  I
> >     got a popup asking me to select a device where grub should be
> >     installed - in a way it resembled fdisk output, there were the
> >     individual devices listed (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc) as well as the
> >     individual partitions on each.  I selected the partition that
> >     contains my kernel images /dev/sda2 and tried to install grub
> >     there.  I saw a message saying that the operation failed.  Luckily I
> >     was able to retry selecting a partition and so I select different
> >     partitions.  I ended up trying all of my partitions individually
> >     until I had tried them all.  I got the impression that I needed to
> >     select the drive device rather than the partition.  So I ended up
> >     selecting both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and none of the individual
> >     partitions.  It reported success and continued on the upgrade.  When
> >     it came time to reboot, I discovered that the machine was locked at
> >     the point where GRUB usually pops up with a kernel selection.  I
> >     don't see anything but a black screen.
> >
> >     I sure wish I knew what I did wrong!
> >
> >     Any help is appreciated - I'm writing from my work machine and won't
> >     be able to try anything until i get home tonight.
> >
> >     Carl Anderson
> >
> >
>
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