Upgrade tool fails to recover after kernel panic in mid-upgrade

[msp3k]

Binary package hint: upgrade-system

(I hope upgrade-system is the right package...)

Upgrading from gutsy to hardy was interrupted by a kernel panic ("critical temperature reached" -- after I found the cat sitting on the laptop!). At the time of the crash, all packages for the upgrade had been downloaded and the upgrade tool was in the process of installing these packages.

After giving the laptop time to cool down, I turned it back on, booted ubuntu, and was greeted with a blank brown X11 screen -- no menus, windows, or panels, and no way to restart the upgrade tool that I could find.

The fix was to cntrl-alt-F1, login, and run sudo dpkg --configure -a. But I am merely two steps above a complete noob. Personally I feel that the upgrade tool should take this into account and recover on it's own. One way to do this would be to have the upgrade tool insert a temporary init script after the download is complete and just before package installation takes place. This init script could perform the above command as well as any other checks and commands required for a proper recovery from an interrupted upgrade.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

This is fixed in intrepid, I added a recovery mode there. For hardy, please boot into recovery mode, select root shell and then run:
$ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/14251233/friendly-recovery_0.2%7Eppa1_all.deb
$ dpkg -i friendly-recovery_0.2~ppa1_all.deb
$ exit

then there should be a "Repair broken packages" option (maybe you need to reboot once). Please run that and see if that brings the system back.

[to be removed (liw)]

This was marked "Fix Commited" about 1.5 years ago. I assume it's now appropriate to mark it as "Fix Released"?

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Since the change Michael's talking about is definitely present in released versions, I'm going to mark this Fix Released.