Ubuntu - Upgrade to 10.04 - general error mounting filesystems

Question

Using upgrade manager I upgraded my 8.04.x LTS installation to 10.04. After rebooting the system failed encountered an error and dropped into the recovery console. It appeared to be a problem caused by ureadahead as described here: http://ubuntuguide.net/howto-fix-ureadahead-problem-after-upgrading-to-ubuntu-10-04. So I renamed ureadahead.conf to ureadahead.moved (after remounting the partition rw). This did not help so I renamed the file back again.

After rebooting the following error appears:

ureadahead terminated with status 5.
udev_monitor_new_from_netlink: error getting socket: Invalid Argument
mountall:mountall.c:3204 assertion failed in main: udev_monitor = udev_monitor_new_from_netlink(udev,"udev")
init: mountall main process (2532) killed by ABRT signal.
General error mounting filesystems

How will I get my system to boot again properly? thanks

---

following instructions from here sort of helped: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=28115 . the only problem was it configured my grub menu incorrectly. Edited the menu.lst to point to the right hd but the id's don't seem to match.

GRUB:
Gave up waiting for root device:

alert /dev/disk/by-uuid/[id] does not exist. Dropping to a shell

Maybe I can somehow reinstall grub to point to the right hd/kernel file?

Answer 1

Did you see this?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1423305
Someone else had the 'status 5' error due to a separate /var partition. There's also a Launchpad bug where a 'apt-get install --reinstall ureadahead' (or 'aptitude reinstall ureadahead') fixed the issue

Answer 2

I never did solve the problem and, with time becoming pressing, I reinstalled Ubuntu. Luckily it recognizes the previous installation and all user data remained intact.

Answer 3

In my own opinion, and this is mine, an OS should not be upgraded. There are just too many low-level details that can go wrong at upgrade time. Under Windows as well as under Linux (all distros), I always wanted to first make a solid backup of all documents and other Data files. For myself, as I now have large amounts of files (in 10's of GIGS), I use external USB hard disks, the latest of which I keep in a safe at the bank.

Yes, there are programs, drivers, and other files that need to be reinstalled, but this makes sure that nothing previously setup will be in the way of the new OS, as it will be put there first. This also gives me the opportunity to do a cleanup of all the programs and files that I accumulated over the years (or months). As well, this is an opportunity to make a good backup of my files.

JF