feisty upgrade frozen in the middle of the upgrade - initramfs image of edgy kernel was modified

[Sam Morris]

I left the upgrade running while I had dinner. When I returned, the system had frozen. It was displaying a corrupted image of the NVIDIA logo. I rebooted but the system froze at the Ubuntu logo with the progress bar empty. I rebooted again and removed 'splash' and 'quiet' from the kernel command; the boot process hung at 'waiting for root filesystem'. After a few minutes it times out, dropping me to the initramfs shell, where it is revealed that it can't find /dev/disks/by-uuid/blahblahblah. My hard disk does not show up in /dev, either as an IDE device or a SCSI device.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Does anything show up in '/dev/disk/by-uuid/'? Thanks in advance.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

It looks like the machine frozen in the middle of the upgrade and the upgrade could not be completted. A way to recover is to boot from the live-cd, mount your root filesystem and chroot into it. Then run there:
$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
$ sudo apt-get install -f
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

There is also a mysterious:

Checking init scripts...
8WARNING: init script for ntp not found.
_all.deb) ...
Fontconfig warning: no <cachedir> elements found. Check configuration.
Fontconfig warning: adding <cachedir>/var/cache/fontconfig</cachedir>
Fontconfig warning: adding <cachedir>~/.fontconfig</cachedir>
Pango-WARNING **: /usr/lib/pango/1.4.0/modules/pango-basic-fc.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.
Pango-WARNING **: Failed to load Pango module '/usr/lib/pango/1.4.0/modules/pango-basic-fc.so' for id 'BasicScriptEngineFc' at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.
Pango-WARNING **: pango_shape called with bad font, expect ugly output at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.
Pango-WARNING **: pango_font_get_glyph_extents called with null font argument, expect ugly output at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.
xpect ugly output at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.
ared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/FrontEnd/Gnome.pm line 117, <GEN1> line 5.

Could you please attach the file in /etc/pango/ ? I wonder why it searches for /usr/lib/pango/1.4.0/ (we have 1.5 and 1.6 since dapper).

Thanks,
 Michael

[Sam Morris (yrro)]

Unfortunately I needed to get the machine back up and so I booted off a livecd, chrooted in and continued the upgrade. I guess it's going to be hard to pin this one down, but I can remember a few points.

At the initramfs shell, there were no hard disk devices at all, and so /dev/disks did not exist. I looked at /proc/modules and saw that the module for my disk controller (via82cxxx) was not loaded. I loaded it with modprobe, and the right kind of kernel messages appeared on the console, but devices for the disks were not created (I don't know if udev should automatically create them in the initramfs environment, or whether I needed to run something else).

The basic problem is that the system was left in an unbootable state even though the upgrade was interrupted. I assume this is because something that calls update-initramfs in its postinst was upgraded before the crash, and the resultant initramfs image was unable to find my hard disks.

I think the edgy kernel's initramfs should *not* have been touched at all during the upgrade process, or at least a backup should have been made (that is, a single backup at the start of the dist-upgrade, so that if two initramfs-updating packages are upgraded, the second one does not clobber the backup).

As for pango, now that the upgrade is complete there is only a single symlink in /etc/pango, named pangox.aliases. It doesn't mention any other files, only x11 font aliases.

[wirechief (wirechief)]

My /etc/pango is the same only a sym link pangox.aliases
I had a break with my install and I followed Michael Vogt's
$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
$ sudo apt-get install -f
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That fixed a problem that I had with the fonts on the desktop only showing a box and no chars, must be a good thing to remember after a upgrade that goes bad. I do have a problem with the boot splash screen having a single distorted line through it but that seems to not matter in getting to the desktop and logging in.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

The 18 month support period for Feisty Fawn 7.04 has reached it's end of life - http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-7.04-end-of-life . Don't hesitate to reopen if it's still an issue with a newer release.
Thanks again and we appreciate your help.