Accidental Upgrade

RJGularte · 09-25-2009, 01:26 PM

I wanted to install new themes on my Debian Lenny OS. I added the debian/sid repository to my /etc/apt/sources.list and when I added the package the dependencies were off and could not install the package. This was all fine, BUT, when aside of that package, when update manager checked the repositories for upgrades, it wanted to upgrade ALL of the packages installed from Lenny to sid. Since the sid repository contains the latest version, the update manager downloaded all the packages and saturated my root partition to the point I can't even save the /etc/apt/sources.list to remove that repository.

I would like to know what can I do to recover my root partition and get my debian to the default installation, without re-installing the OS.

I'm running Debian Lenny 5.0.2 on a Dell Vostro 1310. The computer is dual booting with Windows Vista Bussiness.

Many thanks,

r3sistance · 09-25-2009, 01:31 PM

How bad is the root partition?

Is it mounted a read-only or is it giving different errors.

If it's read-only.. is the following possible

mount -o remount,rw /

as for downgrading packages, I am not sure if their are any rollbacks in apt-get as I don't use it that often I am afraid.

RJGularte · 09-26-2009, 07:28 PM

I don't know what you mean about the root partition being mounted as read-only. How can I check this? what does the command you sent do?

The system works, it boots into Gnome, you can do work on it, but it doesn't recognize the wireless card and the fonts and colors of the windows are not the same as those prior to the upgrade.

The root partition doesn't have any free space what so ever. I think this is because when it was downloading all the package upgrades it ran out of space before downloading all the packages, so it never got around to actually upgrading the packages. So they are all compressed somewhere taking up all the space in the root partition.

Also, when booting the OS, one deamon fails to start. The line that shows this reads something like:

Starting: mDNS/dns-sd deamon: avahi-deamon failed!

Any ideas?

r3sistance · 09-26-2009, 08:29 PM

Ok let's check a few things.

Let's see the output of the following three commands from a terminal window.
df -h
mount
cat /etc/fstab

This should allow us to see what's going on with your hard drive

RJGularte · 09-29-2009, 12:45 AM

OK. This is what I got when I ran the commands

Code:

$df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5             6.5G  6.5G     0 100% /
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  876K  9.2M   9% /dev
tmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda7             143G   60G   77G  44% /home
overflow              1.0M   12K 1012K   2% /tmp

$mount
/dev/sda5 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
procbususb on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
/dev/sda7 on /home type ext3 (rw)
overflow on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,size=1048576,mode=1777)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)

$cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/sda5       /               ext3    errors=remount-ro 0       1
/dev/sda7       /home           ext3    defaults        0       2
/dev/sda6       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hda        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0

lutusp · 09-29-2009, 02:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RJGularte

Code:

/dev/sda5             6.5G  6.5G     0 100% /

There it is. Run a rescue disk and see if you can't delete something relatively harmless, like the contents of /tmp of the man page section at /usr/share/man. Just enough to make the system bootable. Then reboot and uninstall something like big, optional packages.

Finally, back up your data, reinstall Linux and allocate a reasonable size for the root filesystem. Nothing less than 20 GB for the root filesystem.