Debian 3.1 upgrade failed

[Greg Gilmour]

Was running 3.0 "Woody" (yeah, it is a big old, but this is why we're upgrading) on a Compaq DL-360 G3 with a SmartArray 5i. Also running a custom compiled 2.4.32 kernel with the cciss drivers built-in.

The 'apt-get dist-upgrade' seemed to go well and we rebooted the server. It now stops at "LI" when attempting to load LILO. I was thinking (hoping) that '/sbin/lilo' just needed to be re-ran, so I booted off a Sarge net install CD, but soon realized it doesn't have the LILO binary by default and the only way seemed to have to go through the install (and probably wiping away pre-existing files in the process). Is there any easier way I can boot Sarge to re-run LILO to update the partition table? (I didn't see a 'rescue' option in the net install CD, unless there is a different method to use the CD to boot a previous Linux install). I'm probably missing something obvious, but it's a Friday. ;)

P.S. I also noticed the Sarge CD now has the cciss driver listed as '/dev/cciss/disc0/partX' instead of the '/dev/cciss/c0d0pX' as previously...

Thanks.

[Matti_Kurkela]

You should be able to use the installation CD as a rescue CD if you can specify the correct root filesystem at the CD's boot prompt. Everything may not work perfectly because the installation kernel may miss some non-essential drivers, but it should be good for booting to single-user mode to fix things.

Failing that, you can let the installation program start up, then switch to another virtual console: most Linux distributions, including Debian, have a command prompt available like this.

For some reason, Debian installation CDs use devfs: it may be convenient for the builders of the installation program, but as the /dev naming scheme of devfs differs from the standard Linux device naming scheme it may cause some headaches. Devfs is now deprecated, so future Debian versions should not have this problem. The use of devfs in the installation program does not mean that you have to use devfs in the installed Debian Sarge.

By the way... you didn't read the release notes nor the upgrade instructions before beginning, did you?

The recommended way to upgrade from Woody to Sarge is to install "aptitude" on Woody, then use it instead of apt-get in the dist-upgrade phase. There are also some packages which must be upgraded before others to avoid conflicts, and the tools can't quite handle all the special cases automatically. The instructions will cover all these (IIRC) three or four special cases.

[Greg Gilmour]

I should re-phrase, my co-worker actually attempted the upgrade as I was working on something else at the time. I did confirm that aptitude was used to upgrade the HP DL-360 (specifically 'aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade') to Sarge. Whether there were any warnings (specifically regarding to LILO), I don't know and he doesn't recall any.

I will be later restoring the previous version of Debian on that box (Ghost-4-Linux for the win) and attempting the upgrade again myself making note of any warnings that may appear. But I would appreciate any insights as to why the previous attempt failed and/or any pitfalls others have had when upgrading from Woody -> Sarge on similar hardware.

Thanks again.