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Wayne Werner
Asked: 2011-10-20 15:50:51 +0800 CST

How do I recover from this broken upgrade(?)?

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I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 through the upgrade wizard. I had about 30 minutes left on my install, and had to leave. When I came back, my computer was frozen, so I had to do a hard reset.

When it rebooted, I was shown this screen: jail :(

It appeared unresponsive, but I could ctrlaltF1 and get to the terminal where I could log in. It appears that I am not connected to the 'net - sudo dhclient only appears to output one line of text rather than the several that it should. ping 192.168.1.1 does nothing, but I can ping localhost -c 4.

I was hoping that following the instructions here would give me a plain screen without any X startup (that was my theory on why it didn't look good) but it didn't appear to have any effect - also where the author had 7 lines of output, I had only one (which I can't read, of course).

any ideas about what I can do? I suspect it may be an issue with the video card drivers - I have some NVidia card (computer posts just fine, so I know the issue is after the OS takes over). I don't remember if I installed GRUB, but I didn't see any menu pop up the several times I booted. On two boot-ups it actually showed the Ubuntu splash screen, but there it hung and I couldn't get to the terminal like it does when I get the "jail" screen.

If I could get it hooked up to the network I have sshd installed (at least I can ssh to localhost, and I could SSH in from other computers before my upgrade), and could log in and see what I could fix that way.

Worst case scenario, I believe I partitioned off my /home/ directory, so I could reinstall just the OS portion, but I don't really want to do that - I had a lot of problems initially installing Ubuntu with this hardware configuration in the first place and I don't want to go through that again.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

drivers

2 Answers

  1. Since you can get to the console, probably easiest thing to try first is to log in and run:

    sudo apt-get install --fix-broken

    If the problem is merely that some packages hadn't finished configuring, it should be able to complete that, network or no.

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  2. Best Answer

    Trying:

    sudo dpkg --configure -a

    worked! There were several cases where it asked for user input, and I just hit enter for most things. There were a few screens where it popped up a curses-style GUI, and I mostly had to guess where the "OK" buttons were. After the lengthy process, I did sudo shutdown -r now and when it finished rebooting, I was presented with the new Ubuntu login screen. Success!

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