[clug] Dist-upgrade woes - was Re: Advice request on upgrade to Debian Squeez local mirrors?

Felix Karpfen felix.karpfen at gmail.com
Wed Mar 23 12:44:37 MDT 2011


On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:13:37 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 06:56:15 +0000 (UTC) Felix Karpfen wrote:

>>> > your problems could be many things - my one coffee guess would be
>> either:-
>>> > ;dodgy DVD
>>> > ;**no upgrade path for one or more of your Lenny packages**
>> My guess is quite different.
>> 
>> I blame the "xscreensaver" routines,

> Something I hadn't considered.

We were both wrong; but you were closer.

I repeated the dist-upgrade and crashed at exactly the same point.  This 
time, I did not take a break and only the CD drive was locked.

And now I know why.

When the dist-upgrade started, my CD drive was called /dev/hdc. The
entry in my /etc/fstab reads:

/dev/hdc        /media/cdrom0   auto    ro,user,noauto  0       0

There is a sym-link from /media/cdrom0 to /cdrom;

and the "apt-get" routines only recognise "/cdrom".

When I was asked (by apt-get dist-upgrade) to insert my first DVD into the
disk drive, /cdrom worked - because it pointed to /dev/hdc.

By the time the dist-upgrades on the first DVD were completed, the drive 
was renamed (according to the "mount" command) /dev/sr0. And /dev/sr0 
does not have a mount point.

Going to a separate terminal and trying "umount" routines did not work;
the message was that the device is busy.

At least I was able to do a clean shutdown this time.

When I restarted Squeeze, I can get into a terminal and manually mount
/dev/sr0 (with the second Squeeze DVD inserted).  When I then try "apt-
get dist-upgrade" it found the disk but crashes because of unmet 
dependencies.  It suggest running the command with the "-f" flag.

I cannot do a normal boot; the message reads:

There already appears to be an X server running on display :0.

So all is not lost.  

But I thought it prudent to post this message and request comments before 
I do any more experimenting.  
 
Felix





-- 
Felix Karpfen
Public Key 72FDF9DF (DH/DSA)




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