bad upgrade event

bad upgrade event

[Jude DaShiell]

I went and tried doing an upgrade from lenny to squeeze on a friend's 
computer who is located several states away from me.  Huge mistake!  As a 
result of that attempt, the packages situation can't be fixed not even 
with dpkg --configure -a and aptitude is disabled from working and apt-get 
-f install and apt-get -f remove can't do anything to help the situation. 
Grub also can't be upgraded since problems with the boot sector were 
found.  My friend has got pretty many files he can probably download again 
already on the system and I hope the burn script will work for him so he 
can at least burn those to DVD.  I recommended he get the system 
reinstalled by the person who built it for him originally.  I don't even 
think having taken gnome-desktop-environment off of that system before the 
upgrade attempt would have helped but it's too late to go back and 
experiment now.  Might there be any other things that I could do short of 
having a system reinstall that will break the upgrade jam?  I can't even 
downgrade to lenny at least with the tools I know about.

Re: bad upgrade event

[Kitty Litter]

If you really want to bang your head against the wall you could ask the 
person to burn a GRML CD and start it with the ssh=password parameter and 
then debootstrap, makes me kinda ill just thinking about it. I'm much too 
old to ever consider maintaining someone's system like that, it can cause 
the person to depend on you rather than learning about the system and 
helping himself. But what do I know!

Re: bad upgrade event

[Samuel Thibault]

Jude DaShiell, le Wed 15 Dec 2010 13:56:32 -0500, a écrit :
> Might there be any other things that I could do short of 
> having a system reinstall that will break the upgrade jam?

Post appropriate things on the appropriate list, i.e. the output
of the apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get -f install etc., to the
debian-user@lists.debian.org mailing list.

Samuel

re: bad upgrade event

[Jude DaShiell]

My friend is studying Linux now so that I won't be doing this type of work 
for very much longer.