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I am running Ubuntu 19.10 on Wayland in a laptop with no other OS. I have been an Ubuntu user since 6.06 and have regularly upgraded my systems over the years. I have had my present laptop since Ubuntu 18.04 and have upgraded it to 18.10 - 19.04 - 19.10 without problems, but the upgrade to 20.04 failed and broke my OS. I ugraded using my usual method, that is accepting the offer to upgrade from the pop-up. After downloading the files the upgrade started installing but after 10-15 minutes a white screen appeared with the message (in German I translate here):"An error has occurred during the installation. Please contact your administrator"

I don't feel the message to be very helpful, like many Ubuntu users, I am my own administrator, and I have no idea what could have gone wrong because I was offered no information about that.

Fortunately I always do a full Clonezilla backup before upgrading, but this is the first time I've had to use it to restore. My faith in humanity has been restored along with my 19.10 installation. Thank you Clonezilla!

Does anyone have any idea of what might have gone wrong? Has anyone else had problems with the upgrade?

SteveInBavaria
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  • Is it encrypted? There is a known problem with LVM. You absolutely need to add more info. What's in the logs? /var/log/dist-upgrade? – int_ua May 09 '20 at 05:20
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    No, it is not encrypted. After the update crashed I couldn't log onto the machine to read any logs. It booted directly into the white screen telling me to inform an administrator. – SteveInBavaria May 09 '20 at 06:06
  • Try logging in to TTY (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and doing this: https://askubuntu.com/a/346795/20275 The text in English for searching is "Oh no! Something has gone wrong". – int_ua May 09 '20 at 06:29
  • I've located the text in gnome-session and created this issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-session/-/issues/62 Please add your comments there. – int_ua May 09 '20 at 06:39
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    When the white screen appears I cannot do anything, the keyboard is practically dead. All I could do was Control-REISUB. As I said in the OP I have re-installed 19.10 via Clonezilla. Thanks for opening the issue for me, you describe the problem perfectly. – SteveInBavaria May 09 '20 at 07:31
  • I have had another attempt at upgrading after checking the links offered by int_ua but still the same problem: the upgrade hangs with a unhelpful message telling me to look for an administrator. – SteveInBavaria May 20 '20 at 10:59

2 Answers2

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Since you've reverted to backup for now before you try again you can watch for known upgrade problems at the wiki page for Focal (20.04) release and at Launchpad list of upgrader bugs. The best course of action would be, of course, trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong if you have time for that.

int_ua
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  • I have had another attempt at upgrading after checking the links you gaveoffered but still the same problem: the upgrade hangs with a unhelpful message telling me to look for an administrator. – SteveInBavaria May 20 '20 at 11:00
  • Can you try booting into recovery mode and trying to read logs from there? apt install -f is the first thing to try. Also, it's ambiguous: is it freezing during the upgrade or after the upgrade was finished successfully and you've tried to reboot? – int_ua May 20 '20 at 12:08
  • It freezes shortly after all of the files have been downloaded and the installation has started, at about 7or 8% installed I think. The the stupid and useless "inform an administrator" screen appears and it is then dead and I can only force a shutdown. On reboot the "inform an administrator" screen appears and it is exactly as in the upgrade annd I can only force a shutdown. I am so grateful that Clonezilla works so well, the one positive I take from this is that I now know I can trust it. I'm a bit wary of trying another upgrade until I hear that someone has looked into this. – SteveInBavaria May 20 '20 at 14:32
  • It looks like you may have some problems with package dependencies. Can you try upgrading from text mode? Switching to TTY is Ctrl-Alt-F2 (unless you have two separate system users logged in to graphical environment simultaneously) and the command to upgrade is sudo do-release-upgrade. And if you have cable network connection you can try upgrading in the recovery mode (same command without sudo). – int_ua May 20 '20 at 15:11
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    Thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely try that and reports back . It might just be in a few days because I have a lot on at the moment. – SteveInBavaria May 21 '20 at 05:51
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    The upgrade seems to have worked, but I haven't tested much yet. Here is what I did: I opened a terminal and entered sudo do-release upgrade. When I got the message "do you want to continue" I mistakenly did control-c and left the terminal. Then the upgrade command in the terminal no longer worked because the system was no longer up to date. I tried a update but the upgrade window opened but this time with the option of doing a partial upgrade. I accepted that and the upgrade completed successfully. Not sure if everything is ok, but it seems to be. Thanks for taking the time to help me! – SteveInBavaria May 22 '20 at 07:59
  • I think the problem with the upgrade was the Gnome extensions I was using. The reason I suspect this is that I noticed they were all switched off. When I turn some of them on nothing happens and when I reboot they are all switched off again. I should mention that I am running Ubuntu on Wayland. Anyway I will do some further investigation and maybe I'll post a question here about Gnome extensions under 20.04. – SteveInBavaria May 22 '20 at 10:41
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After much help from int_ua I have discovered the problem. It was almost certainly a Gnome-Extension causing the problem. In future I will switch off all Gnome-Extensions before upgrading.

SteveInBavaria
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