[Bug 1769433] Re: do-release-upgrade from 32-bit 16.04 to 18.04 goes ahead, doesn't work and messes everything up

[Alvaro Carballo Garcia]

After finishing the installation, I wasn't able to start the OS again
(forever waiting with a black screen). The first thing I saw while
looking for answers was that 32-bit wasn't supported, assumed that that
was problem and reinstalled it again. In any case and as said, the
installer didn't recognise the partition as a valid OS (either 64 bit
was installed or something went completely wrong) and forced a
formatting.

Regarding messing everything up, it might be caused by a different
issue: an old Linux Kernel. Note that I use that computer under quite
tough CPU/IO conditions (lots of reading/writing to a database) and that
it is quite old. The last time I installed everything from scratch the
load was much lower and these weird issues (e.g., getting regularly
frozen and having to manually fsck at startup over and over) didn't
happen, so I assumed that it was some of the files/modifications from
the faulty 64-bit installation. But apparently it was some kind of bug
which is fixed in the last stable Kernel. BTW, I relied on both MySQL
and MariaDB and the later seems to manage the situation more gracefully
(unnecessarily slow, but not showing the aforementioned behaviours).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1769433

Title:
  do-release-upgrade from 32-bit 16.04 to 18.04 goes ahead, doesn't work
  and messes everything up

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  I decided to test Ubuntu 18.04 on an old computer with 16.04 32-bit
  without knowing that only 64-bit was supported. do-release-upgrade
  seemed to perform all the actions without any problem. But, logically,
  the newly installed OS didn’t work.

  After a quick research, I realised that the problem was the 32-/64-bit
  part and reinstalled the 16.04 32-bit version. I was forced to format
  the main partition as far as the 32-bit installer didn't recognise the
  64-bit installation as a valid OS.

  After finishing the 16.04 32-bit installation, performing the
  recommended updates and installing just a few programs (very stable
  and which I have always used on that computer), the OS started
  behaving weirdly. At first sight, it was working fine, but kept
  getting regularly frozen and not starting properly. Finally, I have
  been able to fix all the problems by deleting the old partitions,
  creating them again and reinstalling Ubuntu 16.04 32-bit.

  Long story short: my computer has been behaving erratically for 2 days
  without never getting a clear indication about what might be wrong.
  Even worse, all this has been provoked because the OS  allowed me to
  perform an impossible action. The fix seems also quite
  straightforward: avoid any 32-bit version to be upgraded unless that
  format is available.

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