recovering Ubuntu from a bad upgrade

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I've tried to upgrade to Lucid Lynx directly from Hardy Heron today. The update manager went through the steps of downloading all the packages needed and then started installing them. Then, while the packages were still being installed, the system froze when the timer said 3 minutes to go. I couldn't even move the mouse and I had force a restart by pressing reset. That's when the trouble started.

Initially I couldn't even boot into the system because it wasn't recognizing a particular UUID. I switched to the recovery terminal and from there, edited the fstab file to comment out that line. After rebooting it did manage to boot in. It turns out that that UUID referred to the SWAP partition, so I reformed the the SWAP partition and typed the new UUID into fstab manually. Now I can boot into the Ubuntu partition, however there are still some problems. It seems as though there were packages that weren't installed properly although the system thinks they installed. Plus I don't know what other packages were supposed to replace the Hardy Heron ones but weren't. The system also appears very slow and sluggish. When I tried sudo apt-get install -f, it didn't seem to fix all the problems.

Does anyone know how to recover Ubuntu from a bad or partial upgrade?

I would always install rather than upgrade. It would be just as quick to upgrade as to fix your problem, too.

If you only have one partition with / and /home on it, then you could delete everything except /home and shrink that partition to make space for a new / partition, and then install Ubuntu with / in the new partition and /home in the old.

If you already have a separate /home then a fresh install should work.

Installing is just as quickly as upgrading and far less troublesome.

As others have said, a reinstall is probably faster and a lot easier. If you still want to try the upgrade route, open up your /etc/apt/sources.list file, change all occurrences of "hardy" to "lucid" and run "sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade".

I've done this with Debian before. Be warned that you may have a crapload of broken dependencies, and APT may get annoyed with you and refuse to clean up the mess. A lot has changed since Hardy, and a clean install is probably going to work out better than trying to upgrade in place.

Especially skipping a few releases will bork things.

Another point: Hardy was still using ext3 and legacy grub. A clean reinstall will let you use the much superior ext4 and grub2.

Thanks for the replies. I've tried to fix everything without reinstalling but I still don't think that I have all the packages that should of come with Lucid. I've created a tarball with all the data that was in my home directory and put it in my windows partition, as it had enough space to do that. I'll try re-installing the whole thing tomorrow and I'll let you know how it goes.

I know that. However, both Hardy Heron and Lucid Lynx were long term support releases and so there was a supported upgrade to Lucid directly from Hardy. I just followed the instructions on the website. The problem I'm having now is because the upgrade was interrupted.

I've downloaded the CD image for Lucid Lynx and did a fresh install. The tarball I created contained all the hidden folders with the configuration settings I had previously. Fortunately, I backed up the default Lucid Lynx settings before I untarred that tarball. After I restored all my data, restored the default thematic settings for Lucid as well as the default pulseaudio configuration (after pulseaudio gave some trouble), from the backed up default settings. Thanks for the help.

One more thing though, is it normal for pulseaudio to take up a lot of CPU resources when it gets confused over settings.

Pulse audio seems like a work-in-progress. For instance, you have to type pactl load-module module-loopback into a terminal to hear your line-in, and the designers state that they "had not considered that use-case", although they have considered encrypting and live-streaming your webcam microphone over VPN to the rear-left speaker of grandma's terminal in Alaska.

Thanks, everything is working fine now.