Ubuntu Upgrade from 11.10. to 12.04

[Peter Hillier-Brook]

On 04/05/12 05:36, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On 03/05/2012 19:29, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote:
>> On 03/05/12 17:18, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> On 03/05/2012 17:53, Peter Hillier-Brook wrote:
>>>> I recently upgraded as above and all went well with 2 exceptions.
>>>>
>>>> 1    Upgrade Manager went into an infinite loop during the attempted
>>>> download of the flash-plugin installer. Manual download outside of the
>>>> Upgrade Manager succeeded whilst the afore mentioned program was
>>>> looping
>>>
>>> Strange, but maybe adobe's site was down? Mine upgraded, including
>>> flash-plugins...
>>
>> Maybe you missed the part where I said, "Manual download outside of
>> the Update Manager succeeded *whilst* the afore mentioned program was
>> looping?
> Nope. But when distupgrade tries to get the file it uses the repository.
> Which is one server. When you do a manual download, you get it from
> another server, probably...

Conceivable, but looping for several hours suggests a missing timer 
somewhere, wouldn't you say?

>>>> 2    The impertinent programmer struck again and modified my BIOS
>>>> without permission (as also happened during upgrade from 11.04 to
>>>> 11.10). This cannot be justified as any part of an upgrade process.
>>>
>>> That's even stranger. How could it have modified BIOS? And more
>>> importantly, WHAT did it modify?
>>
>> How it did it is simple enough, probably via assembler and a BIOS
>> call, and what it did was change the boot order of my SATA disks. To
>> be precise, it moved the disk with Ubuntu aboard (/dev/sdb) to the top
>> of the pile. I normally boot via /dev/sdc which contains my work-a-day
>> Kubuntu system and I get to Ubuntu (and Windows 7 on /dev/sda) when
>> necessary via grub.
>>
>
> Let me guess. You used a removeable disk to install it. Like a USB key?
> Or a USB connected CD/DVD-ROM drive? Some BIOSes automatically
> reorganize disks when you have or remove such drive between boots. My
> Shuttle with AWARD BIOS certainly does.

Not so. USB is not involved at any level and the BIOS was 
programmatically modified. An interesting "confession" has just appeared 
on a GRUB list so I'll take this issue over there. Thanks for your interest.

> Other option is that maybe what was reorganized is not at BIOS level,
> but just the fact that Ubuntu made a different disk's partition "ACTIVE"
> and so the PC is booting on the partition marked at "ACTIVE" by default?
> Or did you really go to BIOS and check the physical order of disks (in
> which case, check for the previous point - run the machine... plug a USB
> attached storage... reboot the machine with disk still attached... and
> notice order of boot disks in BIOS... reboot again leaving the disk
> attached... turn off the machine... remove the disk and reboot... notice
> the BIOS message saying that storage devices were changed...)

See above, but just to answer this point, what would Ubuntu be doing 
setting a partition Active when this status is only of interest to MS 
products? And I don't think I'll source a USB device just to prove the 
latter point. ;-)

Peter HB