I was upgrading from Jaunty to Lucid i reset my system please help

The font is part of the update because you previously installed the font, or installed something that used it. It's also not possible to upgrade from 9.04 Jaunty directly to 10.04 LTS Lucid. The upgrade you were doing, if it had worked, would have given you 9.10 however that is also past it's end-of-life date. 9.04 reached it's end-of-life status over two years ago. I don't think anyone here would have recommend this route to you.

Really, your best bet would have been to download the ISO for 10.04 LTS and burn the LiveCD, then re-install. Keep in mind that 10.04 is supported until April 2013.

It's vital to do backups of all important data before you attempt a release upgrade or an installation. The more modified a system is the more likely it is to fail, and the earlier upgrades were somewhat less reliable than they are now. At this point the best thing you can do is boot off a LiveCD and backup all of your important data. Any LiveCD will do, however I recommend you download the 10.04 LTS ISO and use that one in preparation for re-installation. You're upgrading to the current LTS only when the next one is about four months away.

Once you've downloaded the ISO make sure it arrive in an uncorrupted state:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM

Next, burn the CD at the slowest possible speed and boot your computer with it.

You will to mount the hard drive in the computer so that you can copy data from it. Assuming there is only one hard drive in the computer and you did not make a separate home partition:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

You should now be able to look at your personal data on the hard drive with file manager by going to
/home/username/

If you plug an external harddrive or pendrive into the computer it should automount and you should be able to copy your personal data to it.

Once you are sure you've got all your data do a clean install of 10.04 LTS.

I also recommend that you at least consider setting up a separate /home partition when you re-install. This makes your data a little bit safer, and makes future upgrades and installations a little easier and quicker. Most of us find this is well worth the little extra effort it takes, and once you understand the process it is not in the least bit scary - the exact opposite if anything since you are taking over control of how and where the OS is being installed. I find that 15 - 20 GB is plenty for the / (root) partition, and the rest of the drive can be used for /home (except for the small swap partition of course)

Chris

Opps, I gave the wrong path to your data on the hard drive. The correct path in File manager would be:

/mnt/home/username

Chris

To Chris -

Thank you for the information! I ended up rebooting and going through the startup menu to "fix broken packages", which took awhile. Afterwords I used terminal commands to upgrade the OS to Lucid, and it did work! Even though I was previously using Jaunty. Rebooted again and successfully signed in, and began using Lucid, with all personal data intact.

This is what I absolutely love about the Ubuntu community - ALWAYS there to offer good advice and help fixing seemingly unrepairable system failures. And I love Ubuntu! Because if it were Microsoft, it WOULD HAVE been an unrepairable system failure! HAHA! Linux based systems and community technical support are the SMARTEST! Thanks again!

Hi, What happened was the first upgrade would have been to 9.10 Karmic. You managed to get it going well enough to do another upgrade which took you from Karmic to 10.04 LTS. Pretty amazing really, considering those two older releases are no longer even supported.

If you want to upgrade again after 12.04 LTS comes out you will be able to upgrade directly to 12.04 because it is possible to upgrade from one LTS to the next LTS and skip all the intermediate releases. Next time though, make sure you back up your data first! You have had some incredible luck here. 10.04 is supported until April 2013.

I still recommend that you download the ISO next time though, for a couple of very important reasons:
1)Upgrading is now supported from the LiveCd. It's one of the options after you boot the LiveCD
2)You get a chance to download the data in one go and verify that the ISO in uncorrupted
3)If the worst happens and the upgrade goes wrong you have the latest LiveCD to fix it with.

There's also been some very big changes in the DE which you would need to be aware of. As from 11.04 Unity has replaced Gnome 2 as the Desktop Environment. Unity should be very nice when 12.04 comes out in April, but it is quite different to what you are used to.

Chris