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Something went wrong while upgrading from Ubuntu 17.04 to 17.10 (lenovo 450s). I then started an installation of 17.10 from a bootable usb stick. During that process it gave me an option to install 17.10 while keeping normal user files. That install got to the point of asking for user info, and appeared to be working, but after about 30 minutes without any progress indication I tried to restart it. Now it's not giving me any option to keep existing (non-system) files? Saying:

  • Erase disk
  • Encrypt
  • Use LVM
  • Something else

My disk has (if I go into "Something else" and look at partitions):

/dev/sda    512GB ATA
/dev/sda1   efi   512M
/dev/sda2   ext4  456G
/dev/sda3   swap   20G
/dev/sdb    32GB USB SanDisk

If I go into a root shell and mount /dev/sda2 I see a few things but I'm missing bin, so it's unclear what's become of my root partition. I wonder if sda3 had been my root partition but got formatted as swap?

Not sure how I got into this weird state. Any ideas how to repair all this? Thanks!

Charles Thayer
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  • If you can see your user files, i.e., the ones you need/want to keep then backup and install afresh. –  Jan 18 '18 at 17:18

1 Answers1

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Thanks @MichaelBay, Running from a USB stick I wound up mounting my homedir, which was encrypted (How do I mount an encrypted /home directory on another Ubuntu machine?) then used rsync to backup up the files to an external SSD over USB 3.0.

It turned out sda2 really was root after all, but the failed install deleted several dirs I expected to see such as /etc. I installed a fresh 17.10 using the "Something else" option and mainly left the partitioning unchanged. Turned out I didn't need the backup at all (thankfully).

The biggest challenge was that I tried backing up to an external USB drive which was mac formatted (hifs iirc) and after waiting > 6hrs, I gave up on it and bought a fresh USB SSD that I could format as ext4 (took < 7 mins for 160GB).

PS. Seems like the install process would be a lot better if it would create a file of the current installation state, that one could debug against in these situations.

Charles Thayer
  • 101