Ubuntu
update-manager package

possible crash while upgrading to latest version

Asked by Gary Alan Simmons

It was nearly through with 12.04 LTS upgrade but right about the time it was preparing to restart (i'm not sure just exactly where it was.

I just know the last thing i noticed was restart was next) anyway the monitor went white with random characters in random places...

It didn't really raise any alarms to me because that is what my monitor always does on on reboot.

Unfortunately, it is still in this state.

When it first happened the drive was very active for a while... now it's kind of hard to distinguish whether it's just spinning or writing.

I guess my question is...

How long should i wait before restarting and seeing if it's now unbootable?

Thanks in advance.

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Anton Kanishchev
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Revision history for this message
Best Anton Kanishchev (ak12-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

I had a similar problem - just wait until hdd light turns off then hard
reset - assuming you have backups of your data so the worst thing you have
to do is reinstall.
Hope this helps
On May 3, 2012 9:20 PM, "Gary Alan Simmons" <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> New question #195900 on Ubuntu:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/195900
>
> It was nearly through with 12.04 LTS upgrade but right about the time it
> was preparing to restart (i'm not sure just exactly where it was. I just
> know the last thing i noticed was restart was next) anyway the monitor went
> white with random characters in random places... It didn't really raise any
> alarms to me because that is what my monitor always does on on reboot.
> Unfortunately, it is still in this state. When it first happened the drive
> was very active for a while... now it's kind of hard to distinguish whether
> it's just spinning or writing. I guess my question is... How long should i
> wait before restarting and seeing if it's now unbootable? Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Ubuntu.
>

Revision history for this message
Barry Drake (b-drake) said : 		#2

After this problem, you might need to re-install anyhow - and it might be for the best. It is quite possible that you can get at your data from the live-CD to rescue anything you need even if you can't boot.

Revision history for this message
Matthew Delaforce (matt-hknftjnl78lw) said : 		#3

I upgraded yesterday from 11.10 to 12.04 and at the point it rebooted and started Ubuntu I got a blank desktop with no login options, ie no user name or password fields to see. Also the desktop had become stretched larger than my screen size so the menu along the top of the screen was off the ends.
I waited for 10 minutes to see if the login desktop completed loading so I could log in proper, but it went no further.

Though I was unable to logon as any user, (there were no logon options on screen), I did find the menu to the shutdown or suspend options were working, so I just chose to shutdown then selected the restart option after that. On restart, at the Grub menu, I first choose to try the recovery mode, but this still had no login option once it had allowed me to continue to try starting ubuntu. So after a further restart I choose the option to boot into a previous linux version, ie I had the 3.0.0.17 kernel available, that booted fine. So I uninstalled kernel 3.2.0-24 after that.
I'm now running kernel 3.0.0.17 on Ubuntu 12.04, which seemed fine.

The default kernel loaded by the 12.04 upgrade was Kernel 3.2.0-24 generic and this Kernel seemed to me to be unstable yesterday.

However I now find that kernel 3.0.0.17 also looses the login options, it just lost them a few minutes ago after a fresh boot. It had been working fine this afternoon , but at least this today a further restart has so far got back the login elements.
.
I must conclude that for my system it looks like 12.04 is unstable, no matter what Kernel I am using.
I'm using an AMD dual core Athlon with Nvidia GT430 graphics card.

Interestingly it looks likely my update facility has stopped working now too as Ubuntu 12.04 shows no updates available even though there should be other kernels later than 3.0.0.17 available I would have thought, especially as 3.2.0-24 had loaded with the upgrade yesterday..
.

Revision history for this message
Barry Drake (b-drake) said : 		#4

You are definitely going to need to re-install as a clean install. Backup everything and go for it! BTW with Nvidia, check that 12.04 runs OK from the live-CD before re-installaing.

Revision history for this message
Gary Alan Simmons (moonbasepi) said : 		#5

Thanks Anton Kanishchev, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
Gary Alan Simmons (moonbasepi) said : 		#6

Thanks for the quick responses. After my hard reset it actually loaded as if nothing was wrong... The one time I actually had an up to date back up too. Still had to do clean install because all updates were failing but what the hey, I took the opportunity to experiment with various things. Thanks for the help!