System Update froze - UbuntuMATE 16-04

[Colin Law]

On 21 June 2018 at 20:59, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> But, all of this, especuially, involving the HP external HDD, does not
> change the fact that the initramfs bug prevails, and, has preventedthe
> upgrade from completing.
>
> This all goes back to the unresolved initramfs bug issue.
>
> Even iff the HP external HDD is faulty, that should not prevent the
> software upgrade from completing.
>
> The software upgrade, especially, the Ubuntu base part of the software
> upgrade, should be able to complete, regardless of the state of the HP
> external HDD.

Nobody is saying that there is not a bug. The manifestation of the bug
that you are seeing is that if there is a problem with a disc that
hangs the I/O on that drive then it stops the update from completing.
However from your point of view the important thing at the moment is
the safety of the data on your disc, not the bug.  Even if the bug
were fixed it would not fix your disc.

You can try unmounting the disc using
sudo umount /dev/sdb
If that completes then the system should recover, but I suspect it
will not complete because the disc is not operating correctly.  In
which case as far as I can see your only option is to unplug it.  In
fact if is malfunctioning it may be that the longer you leave it
connected with the system trying to access it the more likely it is
that it will fail completely and lose all your data, so the safest
thing may be to unplug it.

Colin