Tried to upgrade 10.04 with 10.10 system broke and locked me out 10.04 wil not remove from hard drive no matter what I tried installing, it's been three weeks unable to access computer.

Asked by Erosmuse

I used a cd to install 10.04 and tried the same with 10.10, however 10.04 became unstable and locked on to my hard drive and has locked me out of my computer, it will not accept my passwords or aloud me to reset it. I've tried for three weeks or more to remove it from my computer system, I even tried reinstalling the old system, but 10.04 is not letting my computer read the software. It's like this dam thing has taken on a life of it' own (I mean IT!) The error messages are staring problem with the marverick upgrade. I don't know, I have very little computer understanding and I'm very stressed now about whats happening with my computer.

Please Help!

<email address hidden>

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said :
#1

Please tell is Windows installed on this pc...?

Do you have relevant data on it...?

if both answers are NO, the quick solution is to reinstall Ubuntu 10.04 booting your pc from live cd and select use entire disk at install step.

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said :
#2
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Erosmuse (in-stop) said :
#3

First, thank you all in advance for your help with this issue, now to answer your questions.

1) About four months ago the computer a (Dell Dimension 3000) was donated to my organization to help me keep up with community out- reach and it already had the software installed, the donare give me a disk copy of the Ubuntu 10.04 that he made off his own system.
(a.) As to weather windows was installed on it, I can't answer that. I can state that in my quest to free my system from "U10.04" I did contact Dell support and ordered a Reinstallation CD for the computer. However, as I noted "U10.04" refused to recognize the software.

2) Which brings me to your second question and suggestion. I have tried for three weeks or so to reboot ? uninstall / reinstall "U10.04" and when I did attempt to upgrade it with "U10.10" that's when it snapped and locked me out, voided my passwords as well as refused to recognize any software commands, even it's own. It's gone "MAVERICK" on me, that's what the error codes are stating, something about old repositories. Hell I don't know!

So, that's were I stand at this point with a un-accessible donated computer and it's "U10.04" rouge system. Nothing thus far has worked, I'm going to try Mr. Fabio Marconi (<email address hidden>) tip for Lost Password? Sometimes it is necessary to get root access, for example when you have forgotten your password or changed something in /etc/sudoers and things do not work as expected.

Peace & Blessings,

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A. Denton (aquina) said :
#4

Erosmuse, I think you should get some professional help for your problem. In case you don't want to here my advice.

* In case one can assume the data on your hard disk drive(s) is not of great value I strongly recommend you to stick with a stable LTS version like 10.04. Then boot from the LiveCD and install the operating system. During installation I also strongly recommend you to choose the ENTIRE DISK option. Selecting that you'll get rid of EVERYTHING already installed on your computer. This means your broken operaing system will also be ERASED COMPLETELY!

In case you need Ubuntu 10.10 install THAT ONE from a LiveCD. DO NOT upgrade an existing installation of 10.04 to 10.10. I strongly recommend you to NEVER PERFORM a distribution upgrade since they brek things quite often. That's what happened to you in the first place. :-(

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zvacet (ivicakolic) said :
#5

If you reinstall already then I suppose that you don´t have any valuable data on your disc.If that is a case why don´t you try to install Maverick directly ( not upgrade from Lucid).If you still want to upgrade you will need alternate CD not desktop.When you finally install Maverick you can look for repos http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Maverick#Manually_add_repositories

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delance (olivier-delance) said :
#6

If you have no valuable data to recover, do a full reinstall from CD on the whole disk. Using 10.04;1 LTS or 10.10 is not so important.
Be careful, use 10.04.1 and not 10.04.
It's faster to do full reinstall than trying to repair problem due to update-manager.

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A. Denton (aquina) said :
#7

"Using 10.04;1 LTS or 10.10 is not so important." -- I'm sorry, but that's plain wrong. It is important to donsider that upgrading from 10.10 STS to the next 12.04 LTS VIA 11.04 and 11.10 is a more time-consuming task than to upgrade from 10.04 DIRECTLY to 12.04. Especially for people that actually work WITH the OS (especially in a NGO/NCO) comes in handy. LTS is one of the advantages of Ubuntu over many other GNU/Linux distributions.

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