Karmic upgrade failed, possible currupted partition/filesystem

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 3:56 AM, Andreas Schildbach
<andreas at schildbach.de> wrote:
>
> After upgrading of a working Jaunty to Karmic final, it would not boot
> into the system and instead hang in the initramdisk. I did NOT yet
> upgrade to ext4 or grub2.
>
> Booting with safe mode reveals that it could not find my main partition
> (which contains my now Karmic installation).
>

When you are in the rescue mode, there are 2 places to look for trouble.

/etc/fstab

controls where the system looks for partitions when it starts.  If the
karmic install did something to "fiddle" those, to change from naming
drives by to /dev/sda5 style to a LABEL style, or to the newer UUID
style, then it could account for the trouble.

The other place to look is in the grub configuration.  In /boot/grub,
there is a file menu.lst. If you did the karmic install, then the
install of the new kernel would have fiddled this file. Look for a
stanza like this:

title           Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-16-generic
uuid            d68ef8a9-147d-4ada-8895-3667163fee11
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.28-16-generic
root=UUID=9c537cc1-85be-4b8a-86b1-c6ff9e9928ba ro quiet splash
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.28-16-generic
quiet

In my laptop, you can see the system has used the uuid specifiers to
figure out where everything is.  If your install somehow damaged that,
or got it wrong, then you need to fix it.

This all begs the question, how did you install karmic without getting
the new grub?  Perhaps that is at the heart of the trouble.



> Booting into a second karmic system on the sda2 reveals that sda1 is
> indeed not visible any more:
>
> $ ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid
> total 0
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Oct 30 09:22 .
> drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 120 Oct 30 09:22 ..
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 30 09:22
> 500a11a1-86bd-4609-96ca-78797dfb772b -> ../../sda5
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 30 09:22
> b17e1aff-9f02-4fbd-81e5-9b1e6899baad -> ../../sda2
>
> Nevertheless, I can mount my main partition when I directly
> mount /dev/sda1 from the second installation, so the filesystem is
> intact.
>
> When I start "Palimpsest", it shows my first partition as "54 GB
> unrecognized", which is a bit startling.
>
>
> (also reported as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/464411 )
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas