Comment 19 for bug 32123

This also happened to me; in my case, the /var partition filled up during the configuration step of my apt upgrade, and dpkg failed on some early configuration (meaning that everything else, including the initramfs package, was not configured.) The crucial problem is that dpkg/apt/synaptic does NOT report the correct issue ("/var is full - your system is in an invalid state; please do..."); it just says "could not configure this dumb braille package that you're never going to want to use anyway".

When I rebooted, the new kernel did not work, and other kernels were only basically functional (because many things were in an unconfigured state; so, X did not work, network was down, usb devices didn't work, etc etc).

I got out of it by running update-initramfs on the new kernel; when I rebooted again, this got me into X, and it was only then that I discovered that /var was full, and that there was a bunch of dpkg configuring that still needed to be done. Used synaptic to clear some of apt's cache to create space, and all was good.

I reproduced the exact problem on my ibook, which was much more hairy, since in that case *neither* of the kernels worked (yaboot is much less than grub, in terms of features) and for the longest time I could not figure out how to eject the cd drive to boot from a live cd (since the eject button is handled via software which loads after the kernel). For a while, I thought I had a paperweight on my hands (until I discovered the "paperclip trick" for opening the ibook's cd drive, thanks to a pointer from the ubuntuforums).

This is a potentially big problem...the fix should be made in breezy well prior to dapper's release.