Jason Barnabe

So I tried updating my laptop last night from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) to 8.10 (Intrepid) per the instructions. The download was going to take 4 hours so I decided to leave it to do its thing and continue in the morning. My wife was having problems with her laptop (wireless switch was off) so she tried to use mine. As best as I can tell, she found it sitting there at a password prompt, and since she didn’t know my password, rebooted it. In the middle of the upgrade process. When the laptop booted up, it would now display:

VFS: Cannot open root device "UUID=..." or unknown-block (0,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)

Crap. Recovery mode ended with same thing. Choosing a previous version of the kernel got me to a login screen. After log in, just a brown background. A previous version with recovery mode got me a command line. Something to work with.

Using my wife’s laptop with the now-switched-on wireless, I found a few threads that recommended checking /boot/grub/mnu.list to include a initrd line for the new kernel (like the other kernel versions have) pointing to /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-10-generic. Unfortunately, not only was that entry missing, that file didn’t exist.

One of the other options in recovery mode is “Repair Packages”. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, I tried it out. It looked like it did something, but it also complained about not being able to access some update sites. A bit more searching lead to dhclient eth0 which got me (wired) Internet access. Not being sure what Repair Packages did, I tried apt-get dist-upgrade, figuring I’d just restart the update process. It said I had to run dpkg –configure -a. That said there were too many errors for it to run. Modifying the command to dpkg --configure -a --abort-after=99999 made that work. Now it was complaining about:

Warning: The home dir /var/run/dbus you specified can't be accessed:
No such file or directory
The user `messagebus' already exists. Exiting.

So I ran removeuser messagebus and mkdir /var/run/dbus. Ran dpkg again. It did its thing, I rebooted, and I’m back in business!

All this for a new brown wallpaper.

This entry was posted Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under ubuntu. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.