trouble with an upgrade
Hi,
I was fiddling with bzr last night for the first time and on one of my debian sid workstations pulled in the bzr-svn from
experimental (because the one in sid was segfaulting when i tried to pull from a svn repo that wanted http auth). After noticing
that there were some 500 or so packages left back, I thought I'd work on upgrading most everything else (to current unstable). I
started with:
aptitude install aptitude
which seemed to succeed just fine. Then I kicked off:
aptitude safe-upgrade
just before going to bed. In the morning I found that the system was totally wonky (here's what I can read from the bottom of the
screen session (I've since rebooted, so can't scroll up unfortunately)):
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
E: Could not regain the system lock! (Perhaps another apt or dpkg is running?)
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - open (5 Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (5 Input/output error)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
Current status: 0 updates [-547], 0 new [-15337].
E: Could not open file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - open (5 Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
kronk:~# aptitude safe-upgrade
-su: /usr/bin/aptitude: Input/output error
kronk:~#
kronk:~#
kronk:~# halt
-su: halt: command not found
kronk:~# df -h
-su: /bin/df: Input/output error
kronk:~# Read from remote host kronk: Connection reset by peer
Connection to kronk closed.
obviously the final entry was me holding down the power button on the machine
after rebooting aptitude gave errors (asking to run 'dpkg --configure -a' which didn't work at all because /usr/bin/dpkg was now
an empty file --- I tried copying /usr/bin/dpkg from a different (working) sid system but that doesn't seem to be enough to fix
it, I'm not getting an error when I run aptitude about e2fsprogs being improperly installed. However 'aptitude -f install'
doesn't seem to want to fix it, and 'aptitude purge e2fsprogs' doesn't want do much for me either (even when I type "I am aware
that this is a very bad idea" repeatedly in repsonse to the prompts (because of initscripts depending on e2fsprogs I'm not able to
actually complete a purge no matter what choices I try from the manual dependency handling choices).
My root filesystem on this machine is xfs (probably that last time I intentionally do that) and I suspect that an underlying
physical hard drive problem is the original cause of the first error (the disk was certainly not close to full in any case). If I
have to back up some remaining files from my home directory and wipe and start over, that's no biggie (as the machine still allows
me to SSH (or SCP) out from it (incoming is not working, it seems there's something a bit wonky with the networking) so I can
still look around for things I want to save before totally wiping and starting over with a fresh intall). But in the interest of
possibly learning something, are there other things I could try first to try to resurrect the current brokenness back into a
working system?
thanks so much in advance for any suggestions,
~c
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