Can't boot Lucid after upgrade from Karmic

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 5:41 PM, Tony Pursell
<ajp at princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
> On 22 May 2010 at 17:23, Liam Proven wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Tony Pursell
>> <ajp at princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>> > Hi All
>> > Since I upgraded my desktop from Karmic to Lucid I cannot boot into Ubuntu.
>
> /snip
>
>> Is this not a repost?
>
> Not really. Original post was to the ubuntu-uk list.  Tony Travis
> suggested I also try this list as well.

Ahh right, that's where I saw it. Yes, generally, I find I get more
responses on this list.

>> My suggestion would be:
>>
>> [1] Do a clean install, alongside if necessary. See if that works. If
>> it does, just bring across your /home directory.
>>
>> [2] Meanwhile, revert the main install to 9.10 so you can at least use it.
>>
>
> I was thinking this might be the only way out.

I fear so. But each release gets lots of kernel updates; this might help.

Also, it might be worth giving Linux Mint a try. It's a smidge more
conservative than Ubuntu but stays pretty compatible.

> I need some help to do both these. Can you explain what is involved?

For the downgrade: I fear the only way is to reinstall over the top.

But you surprise me; if you need to ask, then why are you mucking
around with all those separate filesystems? It's a lot of extra work
and the risk of filling one of them is considerable.

The original reasons for multi-partition Unix installs mostly don't
exist any more. Now, you can just boot a PC off a liveCD and fix
errors and problems from there.

I recommend just 3: root, /home and swap. That works fine, is quite
space-efficient, and /home can be shared among multiple installations
without issue so long as all use different user account names. You can
even share account names with some restrictions - e.g. GNOME settings
across 2 distros will get confused, but rarely fatally.

You do have /home on a separate FS, don't you?

If so, just shrink the existing install a bit - either shuffle all the
different FSs along a bit to free up 8-16GB or so, or bin the old
install, all of its partitions, and create 2 root partitions. Put 9.0
in one and 10.04 in the other. Use the same /home & swap for both.

> Also I have to say that it is not good that what should be a
> straightforward upgrade ends up like this.  I have done every upgrade
> since Warty and although there were some problems on the way in
> the early days, nothing was a catastrophic as this.  If Ubuntu is to
> make it into the mainstream and compete with Windows and Mac,
> reinstalling is not an option. That is why I would like to find out what
> went wrong here.

Yes, you're right, it is bad, but then, you've been lucky, frankly. I
have had to wipe & reinstall about 4 or 5 times since then! Usually I
find a single install lives through about 3 releases - 2 in-place
upgrades - before it's full of crap, nonfunctional icons, duplicated
apps at different versions and so on.

Very little broke going from a fairly new clean install of 9.10 to
10.04 for me - I was impressed.

-- 
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