My Debian won't load properly due to apt-get dist-upgrade failure

debmar · 11-08-2014, 03:03 PM

Hi,

I'll start with saying that I had my Debian Squeeze installed on a USB pendrive. I simply wanted to upgrade it to Wheezy so I started to follow steps on one of the sites.

Everything was going on alright (it seemed so) but after apt-get upgrade, I executed apt-get dist-upgrade which lasted very long that I had to go to sleep...

When I woke up, I was prompted with some file access error and I noticed that, somehow, my pendrive was, hmm, unmounted? Or there was some interruption between the system and the physical USB drive? I had similar problems in the past, when system was working properly but some fonts/icons were lost suddenly and I had no access to my drive. I normally rebooted the whole system as I thought it was an accident.
So, this morning, I just shut the system down, thinking that I will need to finish the upgrade process later.

How surprised I was when it turned out I cannot start my system. Gnome didn't want to start:

Code:

[FAIL] startpar: service(s) returned failure: gdm3 ... failed!

I tried to execute

Code:

apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

again but with no luck. I only get tons of errors with dependency issues, e.g.:

Code:

gdm3 :	Requires: libaccountsservice0 (>= 0.6.8) but is not installed
	Requires: libgtk-3-0 (>=3.0.0) but is not installed

and many more.

Code:

dpkg --configure -a

shows too many errors and stops

Code:

dpkg --configure -a --abort-after=99999

finishes but doesn't do nothing essential...

Anytime I execute apt-get with whichever option (e.g. I don't have gimp, so I execute apt-get install gimp) it shows the above errors with tons of packages that have dependencies that cannot be installed. Referring to gdm3 problem: If I run

Code:

apt-get install libgtk-3-0

I still get the tons of error messages saying that other packages have unresolved dependencies. It doesn't make any sens to me. I don't understand that output. Whenever I wanted to install a program apt-get didn't complain about other programs... Is there some kind of a lock file that wasn't deleted due to a hardware failure? What could I do to clean the error? I assume that the problem can be reproduced by interrupting an apt-get upgrade by physically unmounting the device...

Thanks for any clues on the case. I wasn't able to find anything useful to answer my concerns...

TheBatmanKiller · 11-08-2014, 07:59 PM

Yeah... the device being unmounted probably messed it up IF the unmounting occurred WHILE "apt-get dist-upgrade" was still running. Of course, I don't trust dist-upgrade because, probably due to my lack of thinking at any point of time, has destroyed many of my Debian systems. (By the way, why didn't you just reinstall Debian?)

Wait a minute... (Spends several minutes googling)
According to this page (http://askubuntu.com/questions/21526...-newer-version), you shouldn't have been using tha...

Could you post up your /etc/apt/sources.list?

k3lt01 · 11-08-2014, 08:06 PM

' know you probably don't want to hear this but clean installs are much easier than dist upgrades for this very reason.

widget · 11-08-2014, 11:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by k3lt01

' know you probably don't want to hear this but clean installs are much easier than dist upgrades for this very reason.

Yes to this comment. Would be a faster fix too.

That said, dpkg --configure -a is a very, very good tool. It is not really for anything near this level. There are probably some better tools but I would run;

Code:

apt-get -f install

and give it up if that doesn't at least start to break up the log jam. That is the APT command for fixing broken packages.

k3lt01 · 11-09-2014, 12:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by widget

Yes to this comment. Would be a faster fix too.

That said, dpkg --configure -a is a very, very good tool. It is not really for anything near this level. There are probably some better tools but I would run;

Code:

apt-get -f install

and give it up if that doesn't at least start to break up the log jam. That is the APT command for fixing broken packages.

If this is what the OP decided to do I'd be chrooting from a Live session and then following basic repair procedures

Code:

#mounting
mkdir /mnt/temp
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/temp
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys; do mount -B $i /mnt/temp$i; done
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/temp/etc/resolv.conf
chroot /mnt/temp

#Unmounting
for i in /dev/pts /dev /proc /sys; do umount /mnt/temp$i ; done

#Some repair commands
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install -f
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get dist-upgrade