it somehow lead me to another epic fail on a kubuntu dist-upgrade (well known so a bit longer waited).
Starting with kubuntu 10.10, raid1 on /dev/mapper/isw_cdghehgfca_Volume0 and logical primary and extended partitions isw_cdghehgfca_Volume01 to 08. Amongst those, /boot, /, /home and such. Doing it the normal way, being asked for d-u waiting for the packages to be installed, and getting an error at the final attempt of running initramfs to regenerate the boot image for the new 2.6.38.2 kernel. ok, space problems on /boot – cleaning up, enforcing new initramfs run, generating boot image again. Everything is mounted, everything clear.
Because when failing d-u the script did not undo everything as stated, but just dropping out like nothing happened (stating that my system will be most likely unstable which is a cool statement).
Next up on the reboot, initramfs shell popped up after running grub, telling the least that it could not find / on isw_cdghehgfca_Volume05 as grub was claiming to be the starting point. now that you can’t edit things in there, but just look at those devices, it came up that the Kubuntu d-u to 11.04 changed the device mappings for partitions from
isw_cdghehgfca_Volume05
to
isw_cdghehgfca_Volume0p5
which is an hilarious fuckup. and cannot be forced by just having no space left on /boot – that happened from time to time, because i assigned to few space on it. so the question on fixing is to get into the grub menu on boot, hit ‘e’ mark the line where it tells root=… hit ‘e’ again, add that fancy ‘p’ to the line, hit ‘end’+’enter’, hit ‘b’ to boot.
w00t, now i can see the startup screen. but then again, cannot mount the other partitions. hm. oh well. changing the device mappings for the partitions fucked up fstab too. happily you’ll get a system shell with vim /etc/fstab, adding the fancy ‘p’ all into it, and telling mount -a to do the mount and df to show them. Oh, look how shiny is that. Now time for a reboot.
Oh, don’t forget to do the grub editing procedure again, or you’ll end up in initramfs shell again. after having booted into the restored system, grub is next. since this is a chainloaded grub2 mechanism (i never understood why the d-u did not install the legacy grub2 somehow, likewise debian squeeze introduced to me) the /boot/grub/menu.lst was updated, and so I added that fancy ‘p’ in all places where the Volume05 was found. Saving and rebooting again to see grub working – hooray for boobies.
Conclusion – the ‘send a bug report’ on d-u failure opened launchpad with opera (not my default browser) asking me to login. I did not fill this out, because I was expecting something automated like when Firefox crashes. So keeping an eye on valuable alternatives as Linux Desktop running even more stable is the best option and decision for the future.