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I tried to upgrade my ubuntu from 14.04 to 15.10 and everything was going fine until suddenly screen turned off and doesn't turn on anymore.

It happened a few more times before, but it turned off only for a little.

The computer fan is working so the computer is certainly doing something as it's completely silent when idle.

It's been an hour or so now, and I'm getting worried as it's likely asking me stuff during the process and I can't answer these questions and the upgrade process might be stuck.

The computer is an HP elitebook 840 G2.

Anyone has some experience with a situation like this? Should I forfeit the upgrade and get to restoring my system or hold tight?

Markus Lippus
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  • For the next person that like me stumble on that old post, the right solution is to unlock the screen from the command line (Ctrl+Alt+F1, then follow the https://askubuntu.com/a/921726/111427) – cmbarbu Aug 21 '18 at 08:22

2 Answers2

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As nothing happened for a few hours I shut the computer down. I couldn't boot to the system any more and was stuck at splash screen, but managed to boot to recovery mode from grub menu (under "Advanced") and figured I'd try to force it to try to complete the upgrade again using:

sudo apt-get update

I got a message that something had gone wrong (obviously) and I should manually reconfigure using:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

This took about 10 minutes and asked a few times about modifications made to some files which it was trying to replace with newer versions. I accepted all newer versions. After that I tried booting to the system again and it worked!

I had to manually reconfigure repositories as there were some enabled from "trusty tahr" and most others had been disabled during the upgrade procedure. After doing this I did:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The system is still a bit wonky as in Screen Reader from Universal Access gets activated while booting to lock screen and turns off after logging in and booting up takes a while longer than it used to, but It works and when I get fed up with the wonkyness I can back up the data and do a fresh install.

Eric Carvalho
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Markus Lippus
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As this question comes up quite high when searching on Google, the right solution isn't to restart the computer as you might indeed get into some troubles. The right solution (including for 16.04 to 18.04 update) is to unlock the screen from the command line:

  1. Ctrl+Alt+F1 to open the terminal
  2. sudo loginctl unlock-sessions (as pointed out by https://askubuntu.com/a/921726/111427)
  3. Switch back to your graphic session : Ctrl+Alt+F7
cmbarbu
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