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

[Walt Mankowski]

On Mon, May 27, 2024 at 12:11:08PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Sun, 26 May 2024 at 12:09, Walt Mankowski <waltman at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Is `/usr` on a separate partition then? (And if so: why?)
> >
> > Yes. When I built the machine in, I think, 2018, I gave it a small
> > (by today's standards) SSD as a boot drive, along with a much bigger
> > HDD. I setup some partitions on it to try to manage the limited
> > space.
> 
> Er, right.
> 
> I personally always keep `/home` separate and on a very few
> installations I use separate `/boot`. So my stock installation pattern
> is 3 partitions:
> 
> `/` - root, about 16GB is modest and 32GB typical now due to the
> extreme bloat of the last few years.
> swap -- typically the size of RAM these days and that's rarely used. A
> couple of gig if the machine has lots of RAM and won't ever need to
> swap or to hibernate.
> `/home` -- all remaining space not used by OSes and swap.
> 
> But IMHO moving `/usr` is some advanced stuff for experts only. Why
> that? Moved to where? How big? How much was used/free?
> 
> >  I wouldn't do it again, but what's done is done.
> 
> Not really. Spent $10 on a ~200GB used SSD, amalgamate all of them
> into one, then fix it or reinstall over the top.
> 
> I am puzzled because:
> 1. You're not telling us the whole story
> 2. You did something which implies serious expert-level knowledge but
> you don't give me the impression of having that
> 3. You say you want to fix it but you don't seem willing to do the
> legwork to do so.
> 
> I find the combination of these things really odd.

I'm equally puzzled why you think I'm holding out on my explanations.

I believe I set up 4 partitions on the SSD: /, /usr, /var, and
/home. Maybe I also made a swap partition, or maybe I decided to only
use swap files. I forget. I also forget how much space I allocated to
each, and it's hard to look up now given the state it's currently in.

My /usr had gotten pretty big over the years. One of the biggest
offenders was supertuxkart, which likes to store the data for new
tracks under /usr/games.

I'm not sure what you're referring to as "moving /usr". I'd moved
/usr/games and /usr/local to the big spinning HDD and symlinked them
back to /usr. Everything else was still there, which of course is
where I want them to be for speed.

Complicating the solution of "why don't I just do a fresh install?" is
that both the smallish SSD and the large HDD are RAID-1 arrays. I
remember having a hard time getting them set up correctly the first
time, and that was 6 1/2 years ago. So I've got to try to find that in
my backups and reapply it somehow.

Also I'm in the process of moving and I don't have a huge amount of
time to work on this right now.

Walt
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