I should have logged everything I did really then it would have been useful
for others. Yep my understanding of apt etc is more limited than I thought
and yes it probably was possible to recover, but for me, downloading
configs and data then uploading where possible is definitely the fastest
and easiest option
On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 at 21:33, Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
> Hi Keith,
>
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 09:14:25PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
> > I went right back to the beginning and followed through the instructions
> > from the link. Got to the installing the kernel and it did load this
> time,
>
> So I suspect what happened before was that you did not put the
> ":amd64" on the end of the "apt-get install linux-image-amd64:amd64"
> command.
>
> > did the check requested in the article and saw it was the correct
> > kernel running
> > installed the amd64 dpkg, apt etc as told
> > then troubles started again could not get apt to run properly
>
> I did say that stopping at the point of installing a 64-bit kernel
> was the easy part and a perfectly valid place to stop, as after that
> it gets tricky.
>
> Impossible to comment further without a log of what you did, but yes
> you have to do some scary things that apt asks if you are sure about
> and it's very easy to completely break your system from here on in
> if you don't know what you are doing.
>
> Unless you are confident in what you're doing I don't recommend that
> anyone does this past switching the kernel.
>
> > By now I thought this is a nonsense, over the years no end of crud has
> > built up, and I have cocked something up.
>
> Probably nothing to do with your past configurations, more likely
> that apt doesn't really know how to achieve what you're asking and
> you have accidentally let it remove something essential. It could
> probably be rescued - when I do this process there are always
> periods of time where the system is broken because essential things
> have been removed, but I then put them back - forcibly by wgetting
> the .deb file and installing it with dpkg if necessary.
>
> So it may be that you've gone too far and really broken it, or that
> it's slightly broken and you don't know how to recover from it.
>
> *You* have done a reinstall now, but if anyone else gets in this
> position then they could post on here where they have got to and
> what's going wrong and we/I will try to help.
>
> Though in terms of good use of your time, it will be faster and
> safer to reinstall, assuming you have backups.
>
> > Now I have a nice clean installation, tons of rubbish deleted and
> > I can manage the various bind zones and apache website files in a
> > more orderly fashion.
>
> It is certainly worth considering that provided you can put back all
> your data and settings, reinstalling is definitely going to be
> faster than fully crossgrading your system. You can run through a
> Debian or Ubuntu install in just a couple of minutes.
>
> > Sorry to have been a nuisance
>
> It's always good to see what problems users are having and if there
> are ways to avoid them. Though knowing details of what exactly you
> did and what then happened would be good instead of, "it broke" or
> "it didn't work". :)
>
> In this case it seems like it is worth reiterating that no one
> should try to fully crossgrade their Debian/Ubuntu system unless
> they are very familiar with apt/dpkg and prepared to guide apt in
> what it's doing when it gives up and tries to remove most of the
> system. As it definitely will do when you go much beyond the kernel.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
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