[mdlug] Gotchas for upgrading Ubuntu to 9.10

[Ingles, Raymond]

 First off, I discovered that I needed to free up space in my root
partition to even attempt the upgrade. I ended up cleaning up the root
partition, but that wasn't enough. Next I copied it to a (larger) spare
partition, and diddling GRUB to boot from the copy. Then I upgraded
*that* partition. Things failed, however - the install CD couldn't see
my disks. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 The two main drives were identical and, once upon a time, were part of
a RAID pair. Apparently some config information lingered on the drives
from that time, and this confused the RAID support in Ubuntu 9.10. I had
to run "sudo apt-get remove dmraid" to work around this. (Apparently
there's a way to clear the information from the disks - "dmraid -E" -
but I found that out later.) The install CD still failed to format or
otherwise work with the drives, though at least it could now see them.

 So, I copied the root partition, as I said. But there was a bug in
9.04's Grub2 config scripts - if it found two copies of 9.04 (an
admittedly unusual setup), the configuration would be generated
incorrectly, and it would always boot off the first partition, not the
copy, no matter what entry you picked. I had to learn about Grub2 and
generate a custom boot stanza to finally be able to boot up the copy of
9.04.

 Then I ran an in-place upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10. That worked... but it
wouldn't boot properly. I had to get to a recovery console, and remove
dmraid as detailed above. After that, it worked.

 Well, almost. It wouldn't mount the swap partitions. I discovered that
the UUIDs of the swap partitions had changed in the upgrade, but the
fstab had not been updated. I had to boot into 9.04, edit the 9.10 fstab
from there, and then I could *finally* boot into 9.10. Oy.

 Thankfully, after all that, things have been working fine. I'm pleased
with the out-of-the-box VDPAU support, and so forth. But man, that was a
painful upgrade.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                    (313) 227-2317

 Isn't it funny how Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blame the
 actions of fanatical religious zealots on 'secular' groups?

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