The problem started when I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04 yesterday. It went along fine until it gave me an error (something about cleaning out the boot partition) and closed. When I tried to start the update again, it kept freezing up. I reset my computer to see if it helped anything.

When I got back to my desktop, the Update Notifier said that I had something like 700 updates! I tried to install the updates and it told me to do the distro upgrade again. I started it again, but this time it was different. This time it said it was upgrading to 6.06, the version I already had. I let it go through the upgrade (it took a good long time.....ten hours, at least) and when I woke up this morning, it gave me an error while trying to install a package. Then it crashed completely. It said that the system may be broken because of it.

I restarted because it told me to and now it freezes during boot, when the progress bar first comes up.

I tried booting in Recovery Mode and it hangs when it gets to "Begin: Waiting for Root Filesystem".

I'm not very experienced with Ubuntu. Will somebody please help?

When the boot menu comes up (you may need to press Esc to see the GRUB menu), is there any other kernels listed with different version numbers. If so, try booting up with a previous kernel.

Otherwise, it may be easier just to reinstall...

--Ian

Probably an error with udev, did you check ubuntu forums?

Not reinstall are you crazy?

Try to access it from a livecd and finish the upgrade?
Hum if you are not familiar with this things of this then maybe IBall is right..

There are three kernels I can choose from and only the last one works. Even so, it says that X is not working, so I can't use anything graphical.

Try booting from the last kernel, and then run "sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade", which will hopefully let the upgrade complete.

--Ian

I tried finishing the upgrade that way, but I still got errors.

I also notice that it says "Ubuntu 7.04" on the screen when I log in. So, do I already have 7.04?

Would I just be better off reinstalling? I made multiple partitions when I installed (boot, home, etc), so couldn't I just reformat the boot partition?

Not much point I would think - only has the kernel (and initrd) images along with memtest and of course grub in a sub-directory.
Sounds like Edgy all over again. I decided to wait a while, and never did get to it - still on Dapper. Oh well, I'll give it a few weeks and see ...

Separate partitions, well done.

Reinstall then, just leave your home partition alone, assign it but do not reformat.

From the livecd, back anything you can from /etc you think may be useful. If you can boot into a shell, use midnight commander rather than mucking about with the live cd.


A few years ago I had an HD failure on my root partition on debian, all I lost was /etc, due to partitioning. Now I back it up once a month, so if it happens again, I have few probs after a reinstall.

I keep data on a partition which i do not need to modify, and recently i started backing up there, (I know physical disks are safer, but i will do that when i get enough to fill a dvd)- but and I'm new here, but i believe your supposed to upgrade through each step to 7.04 if you have 6.06 you need to upgrade to 6.10 and from 6.10 upgrade to 7.04. Though with your situation i would do a new install of 7.04 then you will not have system issues, that's what i did and, of course i had anticipation and moved all the files i wanted to a safe partition. It seemed quicker to me seeing as i install 7.04 and theres only 2 updates, if you were to go to 6.10 you would have to install many updates, last i installed 6.10 i had to go through like 260 mb of updates, and from there you would have to install 7.04, more downloading. So the options are out, if your files are safe you can do a fresh install after downloading new disc (that's faster but not necessary if you wanna install what you have and update and re-update and dist update and re update and dist update), or if your worried about losing important files that arent on a separate partition you may have to figure this one out and give your comp time to download many many updates. Good Luck,