[GTALUG] Ubuntu update gone bad

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss at gmail.com>

| Revos have an EFI bios, right?

No, this is pretty old.

| I used to get this all the time on my
| Samsung Chronos, until I blew away the dual-boot and put it back into
| legacy (aka "working") BIOS mode.

Useful lore.

| Boot-Repair <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair> on a
| bootable USB stick will likely fix it.

OK.  I'm partway into getting a USB stick for Ubuntu 14.04.3.

Negative observation four:  ubuntu mirrors are inconsistent.
	<http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04.3/>
and	<http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/14.04.3/>
are not the same as
	<http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-cdimages/14.04.3/release/>
but it is close enough to be confusing.
	ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso
is in the first two but not the last.
(I usually go to a separate mirror for the .iso and the SHA256SUM)

Negative observation five++: although the .iso is only 1G, the Ubuntu 
Startup Disk Creator said my 4G USB stick was too small.  It even said 
that my 8G stick was too small until I tried enough times and ways.  And 
then, after perhaps 10 minutes, it asked for a password to install the 
bootloader (why is that more special than formatting the drive?) and then 
said that it failed to install the bootloader.  Probably this 5 year old 
bug:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/859539>
You can see from #6 that I hit this before.
The virtually secret log ~/.cache/usb-creator.log isn't helpful.
Seems to be some kind of dbus timeout.
the logfile seems to never be emptied!  I have entries from 2013!

So I invoked usb-creator-gtk from an xterm, with secret flag 
--alow-system-internal
Now it won't work because the USB partition /dev/sdb1 is mounted.
I cannot unmount it with sudo umount /dev/sdb1.
Ejecting makes it unavailable.
dd'ing a couple of megs of zeros to /dev/sdb leaves it unperturbed.

The final trick was to format the USB drive with the desktop's formatter 
and not have usb-creator-gtk do the formatting.  My guess is that
there was some race between useb-creator-gtk and "the desktop".

This stick is now nicely bootable.  I booted it, installed boot-repair
on the stick (why isn't this part of Ubuntu?), and ran it.  The result
worked -- I could boot Ubuntu 14.04 from the hard drive!

The Grub menu was a mess but it was correct.  I fixed that from
within the installed system.

Negative observation 6:  The updated-to-14.04 system had some ugly
console messages during booting and they didn't go away.  Putting one
into google, I got a hit in German and guessed what it meant.
Apparently HAL isn't used any longer and one of its udev rules
(70-something) didn't follow modern standards.  The cure was to
"apt-get remove hal".  How would a normal user figure this out?

| Under certain circumstances,
| Windows updates will routinely destroy grub, so keep this stick handy.

I booted Ubuntu 12.04 after Win 7 updates.  So that isn't a good excuse 
this time.