Okay, so the first round of updates (10.10 to 11.04) didn’t go so well. I’m typing this up at my main PC next to my server, which has been hit by bug #753853 – “The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present …” Sigh. I think what happened is that X decided to fall over midway through configuring the packages.
This drops me at a prompt which asks whether I want to skip mounting /, or to attempt a manual
recovery. Skipping just starts the same error for the next entry in /etc/fstab, but hitting “M” drops you a root recovery prompt with a readonly Filesystem.
However – all is not (hopefully) lost! Within that bug report is a resolution:
Choose M to enter recovery console. where sda1 is my installation partition: # mount -w -o remount /dev/sda1 / # dpkg --configure -a
the mount command remounts / as a writeable filesystem again, which we can then jump into with dpkg to finish configuring the update packages (and saying “No” to hundreds of config file updates)
Okay – dpkg finished, and it’s booting… there’s plymouth… mouse pointer! Hooray, here comes X.
Wow, I’d forgotten how bad Unity was – THIS is why I didn’t upgrade the server.
Okay – on to 11.10!
Edit: The upgrade to 11.10 went extremely smoothly. I just need to ensure all my cron jobs and various other scripts run correctly, then we are all set!