System won't boot after failed upgrade from 23.10 to 24.05

[Walt Mankowski]

On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 06:19:10PM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> I think you're out of luck. There's an endless number of things that can got
> screwed up here. Basically at some point:
> 
> - either in a middle of installing new version of some set of packages
> 
> - or attempting to configure some set of packages
> 
> - or attempting to uninstall or purge older version of packages
> 
> -- no way to tell which is the case without hands-on debugging of the system
> in question: the whole thing went sideways. And when the package
> installation process encountered an error who knows what happened after the
> fact before the whole thing shut down, making the whole situation worse.
> 
> It also doesn't help, very much, that Debian/Ubuntu's do_release_upgrade
> apparently plows ahead and does its thing on an existing, live, running
> system. I always thought that this was like attempting to replace all four
> tires on a car while it's still driving on the highway. I always believed
> that it would be more reliable to reboot into single user mode, then
> everything gets updated while the most of the system is shut down, like
> <cough> other, non-Debian based distros go about an upgrading to a new
> release.
> 
> Because now, the new release likely has many system libraries that are not
> binary ABI compatible with the previous release, so now when things blow up
> like this it's fairly likely that there are incompatible, different versions
> of packages that need to be cleaned up, preventing the system starting,
> which sounds like you're seeing. What are those? Only a hands-on, forensic
> inspection of the ailing system will determine.
> 
> I suppose that someone with sufficient expertise in these things can go and
> boot off a live image, mount the existing partitions, sift through dpkg/apt
> logs to determine what exactly was being installed/uninstalled when things
> went to crap, fix it, then finish updating, and maybe get lucky and be able
> to get things working well enough for 'apt dist-upgrade' to fix everything
> else.
> 
> But, all a mere mortal will be able to do is just boot up the same live usb
> image, mount the the existing partitions, make a backup of their data, and
> then just reinstall from scratch.

Thanks for the explanation.

Sigh. This isn't how I was planning on spending my weekend.

> P.S. Every time I run 'apt upgrade', before asking for confirmation apt
> tells me how much additional disk space, if any, the updated packages will
> require. Bummer that do_release_upgrade does not do the same?

Thing is, I'd already tried to do_release_upgrade once and had it
complain that I didn't have enough space on /usr. That time it aborted
cleanly and restored all the old packages.

I deleted a few things and tried again. This time it got further along
and failed at a point where it couldn't recover. At that point I
removed wine, which freed up some space, and told me it could free up
a lot more if I ran `apt autodelete`. That freed up a suspicious
amount of space, likely because it also deleted old versions of
packages that the release upgrade had already replaced.

I'm guessing if those packages were still around I might have better
luck with rebooting. Oh well.

Walt
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