[ubuntu-uk] Upgrade woes

[Glen Mehn]

Hi Barry,

You're not by any fortunate chance in London, are you?

Can you give us an idea of your filesystem layout? i.e.:

/dev/sda1 is /boot
/dev/sda2 is /home
/dev/sda3 is /

or whatever? I am willing to bet you're not getting all the filesystems 
mounted properly/in their proper place. For instance, in the example 
above, you'd have:

boot to your live CD
Open a terminal window
Type 'sudo -s' #this should give you a root prompt
mkdir /mounts/oldroot
mount /dev/sda3 /mounts/oldroot
mount /dev/sda2 /mounts/oldroot/home
mount /dev/sda1 /mounts/oldroot/boot

chroot /mounts/oldroot

# you should now have a root prompt that may look a little different
# maybe here just try running
update-grub2
# then
grub-install /dev/sda   #assuming your ubuntu install is on /dev/sda

# and tell us what the output is.

I am assuming here that you have only one OS on this disk and aren't 
doing anything funky.

Cheers,

Glen

On 18/10/10 07:27, Barry Titterton wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-10-17 at 20:48 +0100, Rob Beard wrote:
>> On 17/10/10 17:34, Barry Titterton wrote:
>>> I finally found the time to try and fix this machine but I could not get
>>> this to work when running from a LTS live CD: when running dpkg
>>> virtually every line in the terminal had "permission denied", then the
>>> process gave up with the message "too many errors".
>>>
>>> Can you please give me exact, "Linux for Idiots" instructions for every
>>> step of the operation as I am obviously not doing something right.
>>>
>>>
>> I'm guessing you need to run the command as root, so put sudo in front
>> of each of the commands.
>>
>> Rob
>>
> I tried this and it had no effect, same errors.
>
> Should I be mounting the hard disk in a particular way or with specific
> modifiers?
>
> Barry
>
>

-- 
Glen Mehn
glen.mehn at oba.co.uk
skype: glenmehn | blog: http://glen.mehn.net/mba
UK: +44(0)7942 675 755 | US: +1 415 704 4737