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!