So I logged in to my home server recently and found in the MOTD that an upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 was available.  Being a bit cautious about things I asked a colleague if he’d done the upgrade and he had, the only issue he’d come across was for hardware I don’t use so thought I’d crack on.

That night I got home, ran do-release-upgrade, answered a few questions and left it to it.  It carried on tinkering with one of my programming projects on my desktop PC and several hours later, tired after a satisfying nights hacking, I shutdown my desktop.  Completely forgetting I had an SSH session open…
I promptly logged back on and checked my server, in HTOP there was a process at the top of the list that looked upgrade related so I left it to it overnight.  Turns out that as I didn’t have screen installed there was no way to reconnect to that upgrade session which was an arse to say the least!  I didn’t have a choice, that I know of, but to reboot.  I did so and it kernel panicked on boot, something to do with not being able to mount something.

::Expletive deleted::

I loaded in to maintenance mode by selecting the advanced option on reboot and looked at what was or wasn’t mounted.  It turns out two of my four disks weren’t being mounted by fstab on boot, I ran blkid and they weren’t listed either.  I managed to find the following command on Ask Ubuntu which showed that the disks we’re still being detected which was a good sign.

sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL

I managed to manually mount the disks as EXT4 and could access the data so I figure this is a quirk of 16.04 I need to figure out.  So far so good!  I commented the two drives out of fstab and attempted a reboot, I got a bit further but ended up in maintenance mode again.

This time around I did some more digging and found the “apt –configure –a” command which reconfigures all the packages installed, this was recommended for interrupted installations and for me it worked a treat.  I could now boot normally!

As previously mentioned I use Greyhole for file duplication across my disks, for long-time readers of my blog or those familiar with it it’s very similar in concept to Drive Extender on Windows Home Server, Greyhole wasn’t happy.  First off it complained about PHP and MySQL errors so one by one searched for the error line and installed the missing packages.  After that I managed to get Greyhole running against the manually mounted disks and I’m now moving data around so I can reformat the two odd ones out that are listed as zfs_members so I can get them in line with the others.  That’s in progress and I’ll cover it in another post as this one has rambled on long enough.

It has certain been a learning experience and I’ve got nerd points from my colleagues for actually managing to fix a borked upgrade, apparently most people would just reinstall but I figured I’d have a stab at it.  For a certified Windows fanboy I’ve certainly come a long way!