Please try to get it right in future

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 11:21:38PM +0300, Andy Jarvis wrote:

> A week or so back, I executed a Synaptic smart update, as is my wont on
> a fairly daily basis. I noted that, due to some discrepancy between main
> program and lib, Evolution was to my horror uninstalled.

That's the difference between a "smart" upgrade and a normal one: you are
explicitly telling Synaptic that it is OK to add and remove some packages in
order to upgrade others.

> A subsequent reinstall put it back with moderate inconvenience. This week
> however a more serious failure occured. On Tuesday evening I carried out a
> Synaptic smart update and a new version of the K7 kernel was installed.
> Nothing over which to raise eyebrows. That evening I shut down my PC and
> went to bed. The next afternoon I switched on same PC and Linux, to be
> precise Ubuntu Linux, failed to boot. The problem transpired in that all
> the initrd files had been deleted, the Grub menu.lst had even been
> scrubbed of references to initrd and I was in the wilderness.

My first guess would be that the upgrade failed for some reason (perhaps you
ran out of disk space), but you didn't notice, and rebooted anyway,
resulting in a broken system.  This has happened to other users in the past.

Exactly the same kernel was installed on a large number of other Ubuntu
systems without incident, so it is not simply broken.

Also note that unless you explicitly removed it, you still have the kernel
which was installed when you first installed Ubuntu, selectable from the
grub menu.

> I booted into my BeOS partition and sent a help request to the user list,
> with a reply that indicated the symptom of the problem - no initrd
> command. True. When I asked for a solution, the reply came: run a
> dpkg-reconfigure against the kernel version. How to do this when I
> couldn't boot into Linux? Next reply: same way you viewed the menu.lst.
> Well one way was by mounting the Linux partition in BeOS and reading
> (Linux partitions are of course read only in BeOS) the other way is to
> view the code within the Grub bootloader. Again all is read only and Shell
> commands as such cannot be executed.
>
> When I requested further help, such as whether there exists a boot floppy
> image from which I could repair the problem or whether the Ubuntu install
> process has been fixed to allow non-destructive install (i.e. a repair
> rather than complete re-install) I was met with utter silence.

I regret that the support that you received at no cost has not been
sufficient for your needs.  Paid support options are available if you
require a higher level of service.

> The simple facts are these. You can, under the partitioning section of the
> install, select to use an existing Linux partition without formatting, but
> the install WILL fail. So my problem could only be "solved" by a total
> re-install of Ubuntu Linux. I lost all existing data and configuration
> information.

That is not the only way to solve the problem, but it was the simplest for
you.

> There has been no other solution offered. And as far as I can tell, it was
> all caused by a rogue release to the repository of a new version of the
> Linux kernel.

No, it was not.

> My point with all this is that there remain some significant problems to
> be resolved. I very much hope that they will be resolved and I look
> forward to the day when I can truly depend on my Ubuntu installation as my
> OS of preference. So far I have had 4 of the releases since the first back
> in mid-September, and have carried out 4 complete installations on the
> same machine, indeed the same partition. If I am to be able to rely on
> Ubuntu, I should never have to carry out a 5th install, but hope very much
> to be able to maintain an ongoing update process to keep my system
> current.

Not a single other Ubuntu user has reported such a problem to my knowledge,
and your account has not contained enough information to diagnose the
problem.  Unfortunately, no one is currently available to walk you through a
more detailed debugging session.

> Best of luck to the team responsible for the most significant (and
> certainly the most headline-grabbing Linux distribution to date). My plea:
> do not rest on your laurels but continue to improve and perfect this
> excellent OS.

We will.

-- 
 - mdz