Failed 16-04 Upgrade recovery question **SOLVED**

[Jay Ridgley]

Ralf,

Thanks for your pointers...

Admittedly I probably had a knee jerk reaction... I will try to be more 
diligent in the future.

The problem was a failing disk drive...

I had four systems all running 14.04 LTS all up to date. The current 
status is:

System 1 - Firewall server that is headless and maintained via ssh. 
Updated to 16.04 LTS successfully! Using apt via ssh.

System 2 - A laptop it was updated to 16.04 LTS successfully via the 
Software Updater using upgrade release option.

System 3 - My wife's system (it was the one that had the problems). I 
replaced the hard drive and installed 16.04 LTS from a CDROM I burned 
fro the repositories. It is now up and running.

System 4 - My Primary system. Still at 14.04 I have not yet had the guts 
to try it! In light of the inconsistency of my efforts.

Thanks,
Jay

On 09/18/2016 11:51 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Sep 2016 20:18:20 -0500, Jay Ridgley wrote:
>> I was attempting to upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 when the system
>> reported an error message and QUIT!
>
> What error message did you get?

To many errors...

>
>> I created an CDROM from the Ubuntu site. WQhen I attempt to do an
>> install I get a message that there is no root partition. But there is
>> not an option of creating one either.
>
> Do you want to overwrite the 14.04 install? Don't you want to fix the
> interrupted release upgrade?
>
My intent was to overwrite the 14.04 but since it failed (see below) I 
could not continue.
>> The device entry contains the correct drive info but the partition
>> table space is BLANK.
>
> What steps were you doing, to get there. What drive info do you get?
>
>> Ideas for recovery appreciated.
>
> What is broken and what do you want to recover?
>
> I suspect that after the upgrade failed, you were unable to boot 14.04.
> If this should be right, then you didn't spend much time to find
> help that already is provided and is available by the mailing list
> archive.
>
> First try to boot using recovery mode, if this shouldn't work, chroot.
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCdRecovery
>
> As soon as you have got access run
>
>    sudo apt update
>    sudo apt -f install
>    sudo dpkg --configure -a
>    sudo apt full-upgrade
>    sudo apt autoremove
>
> After this, what does
>
>    lsb_release -rc

	lsb_release -rc reported 16.04 xenial
>
> say? If it's still 14.04 and you shouldn't use third party repositories
> run
>
>    sudo do-release-upgrade
>
> and don't forget to post the commands you run and the output you got,
> if something should fail.
>
> FWIW you are aware that if something fails, you also could take a look
> at log files? You could use the copied output of a command or a log
> file to google?
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>
>


-- 
Jay Ridgley
jridgley2 at austin.rr.com
Registered Linux User ID - 9115
https://linuxcounter.net/cert/9115.png
Registered Ubuntu User ID - 23320