I had 20.xx running really well and decided to uprade to 22.xx latest-greatest, ran the upgrade command and sometime after the machine froze, or almost froze - would not accept my login password at the lock screen. I left it disconnected from the monitor and external power overnight but did not force shutdown. The next day I get the "Oh no. Something has gone wrong and your system cannot recover, contact your systems administrator".

I have a live version of Ubuntu 22 on a flash, trying to boot off of it. What is the key to boot of the flash? I see it's F12 but it's not responding properly, I am not seeing boot options. F2 to get into BIOS is protected by a password. (Which I don't need to go into anyway) I got this machine with Ubuntu per-installed.

Panasonic 5550 is the hardware.

Have you tired booting into the recovery kernel from the grub menu? That should get you into a basic text prompt where you might be able to run some commands.

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Well, the easy way ... since you backed up all the data you wanted to save 'before' you upgraded... right? Therefore just install 22.04 and copy over your data from one of your recent backups. Done. That is my way of 'fixing' upgrade problems, as upgrades are known to fail now and then! I believe one of the first steps mentioned is 'backing' up your data before upgrading. Where you 'may' run into problems is if secure boot is enabled, and you can't disable it in BIOS because it needs a password to get there .... catch 22. Someone more knowledgeable may get into this conversation and help you out.

You haven't indicated any attempt I can see to use text-mode shell prompts to use installed system. At the Grub menu, strike the E key and append a space and a 3 to the linu line, then proceed with the boot. With any luck, you'll find yourself with 5 or 6 shell prompts available (via Alt-F[1-6]) on which you can login to collect and examine logs to try and determine what went wrong, and attempt repair. "Oh no. Something has gone wrong" generally means something has gone wrong the the X window system that GDM and/or Gnome cannot cope with.

I made backups.

OK, I got into the grub menu. By hitting ESC during boot. Now what?

ls -l (hd0, msdos1) /boot

does display some kernel files and that is the boot filesystem.

However, when I do this:


grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz-5-15.0.71-generic root=/dev/sda1
grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.15.0
grub> boot

results in a kernel panic

if do
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
it won't run the linux /boot command, says kernel not found.

So I got into the root shell prompt with no graphics. Now what?

I mounted a flash drive, copied all the critical information there.

if I try to run startx from the shell prompt, I get the "Oh no" message and X doesn't start.

I have 4 kernels available for booting and none of them boot. I am in the safe mode for the newest one.

I am there. Looking at various log files in /var/log. Thus far nothing jumps at me.

Yes, I have the secure boot enabled and I can't disable it in BIOS because I do not have the password.

How do I unscrew the X problem? The filesystem is fine, but X Windows got screwed up.

I will try to reinstall X server:

apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg

I resolved the problem, from the safe mode, chose the option to repair the filesystem (whatever it's actually called). Then ran the update command from the shell (without xorg). Then rebooted.
It's back.
I am on Ubuntu 22 latest-greatest.

Good news. You have more patience than me . Enjoy. You might want to mark the thread as 'solved'.

It's mostly solved but I am still not getting how the upgrade went off the rails so bad.

Well, according to this https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-upgra...ammy-jellyfish, there's a few steps you should perform before you get to the '...upgrade' cmd.
Maye you missed one ?

I followed the official procedure here and it hang in the middle of the process. I don't know what happened. The screen locked, and it would not accept the password. I left it in that state overnight, it did not progress anywhere beyond that locked and inaccessible screen, then did a reboot and it was hosed.

It hosed the X-server as it turns out. I could get into the single user mode but every attempt to startx would end up with a stuck mode. They need to do a reality check before starting startx with a bad config file or some defective files or whatever.
and the upgrade should not have hosed X to begin with.

There is a bug they need to address. Looks like multiple bugs.

https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/upgradi...ftware-updater

Nothing added ???

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I retro-graded back to before-'EFI'