Upgrade failure: What now?

[Mike Sussman]

Folks,

I have tried to upgrade my Ubuntu Hoary system to KUbuntu Dapper,
but the upgrade fails.  I would very much appreciate it if someone could
point me to documentation or a Howto to help my complete this upgrade.

I am running on a Dell Inspiron 8000 with a 900 MHz Intel CPU and
512 MB of memory.  I have a multi-boot system with MS-Windows-ME
and Ubuntu Hoary, with GRUB as bootloader.

I made a copy of my existing Hoary system to a spare partition and booted
it, just to be sure it worked.  Then I tried to upgrade it manually using
the "standard" steps.
1.  Construct a clean /etc/apt/sources.list file pointing to dapper.
2.  sudo apt-get update
3.  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
4.  sudo apt-get install ubuntu-base
5.  sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

The upgrade failed at the "dist-upgrade" step.  It failed several times,
complaining about various packages, and I had to use
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f
after the first time.   Each time it failed, another invocation
of apt-get dist-upgrade -f seemed to get past the problem.

Finally the upgrade failed permanently trying to upgrade lvm2.  It
seems that the pre-installation script fails, but I don't know how
to find out how it failed.  The failure was permanent: I forced a
second download of the lvm2 deb files, and then I manually copied
them from my CD, all with the same failure from apt-get.  (The full
version information: lvm2_2.02.02-1ubuntu1_i389.deb and .udeb)

I imagine that I could figure out what is wrong if I could find the location
of the pre-installation script and see why it is failing.  Where does it
live, even temporarily?  Is it a bash script?  Is there some way to
force it past the problem, if it cannot be fixed?  What are my alternatives?

BTW, I also tried a straight installation from CD, but that installation
also failed,
for reasons even more mysterious to me.   (See my earlier posts with
subject,
"Install failure at grub installation step".)  It is looking like I will
have to stick with
my existing Hoary system.  Sigh.
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