[ubuntu-uk] System hosed during network upgrade to 8.10

[Alan Pope]

2008/10/31 George MacLeod <bhaltair at gmail.com>:
> I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and have never had a major problem until
> now. I have upgrade before via CD and via the network and always with only
> minor issue, if any, until now. I ran the network upgrade as before to go
> from 8.04 to 8.10 and everything went as it had in the past, until the final
> stage when I was asked to OK the removal of obsolete packages. I thought
> nothing of it as this is normal, but alarm bells stated ringing when I saw
> Firefox, Evolution, compiz and Xorg being removed, but the process had
> already started.
>
> I then clicked restart at the end and that's when I realised all was not
> well

This was possibly not wise. For future reference if you have a
situation where the system is in a dodgy state, a restart is probably
not the best course of action at that point.

> I've tried to reboot several times with the same result and booting into
> recovery mode just leaves me hanging at a terminal prompt.
>

A logon prompt? If so can you logon okay?

> Needless to say I will not be upgrading any of my other machines until I can
> get this fixed.

Conversely I have upgraded 5 machines and not had this kind of issue.

> My PC is a Dell Dimension Dual boot with XP on a corporate LAN.
>

What's the package history on the machine? Have you ever used
automatix or something similar to install packages? What do you have
in /etc/apt/sources.list and any files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ ?

Is the "ubuntu-desktop" package still installed (assuming you can get
logged in), type this:-

dpkg -l ubuntu-desktop

(that's a lower case L).

Cheers,
Al.