Crash while upgrading kernel & stable releases

[Markus Kolb]

Vincent Untz wrote on Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 11:12:49 +0200:
> Hi,
> 
> I updated one of my Hoary computer yesterday and, unfortunately, it
> crashed during the upgrade. What was really unfortunate, is that there
> was a kernel upgrade. And what was even more unfortunate is that the
> kernel version number was the same as the previous one. So it deleted
> the old one...
> 
> As you can guess, the result was that the computer was unbootable (and
> still is ;-)). I know the upgrade contains only security fixes, but I
> believe the version number should have been incremented, if only to
> prevent problems like this one. Wouldn't it make sense to adopt this
> policy?

The package version has to be incremented or it won't be upgraded.

The problem exists in any Linux distribution and is based on the package
name which doesn't change and so all files of the old package will be
deleted before the files of the newer package will be installed.

RPM based distributions have a more detailed version number scheme on
the kernel files in a package which is in Debian and Ubuntu only the
main version.  
But because of dpkg package management there won't be any change if the
version numbers would be more detailed.
I think dpkg has not an interface for removing a package only in
database without deinstalling it's files like RPM has.

So at the moment you have to manage a backup copy of your kernel files
yourself.
And/or you do a double check of the kernel updates before you reboot.

Do you know how to reinstall the kernel package on an unbootable system
or do you need help on this?

Why your machine has crashed? Do you have any detailed information about
this?