A quick word to the wise. I attempted an upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 on my workstation at work. This computer uses an Nvida NForce 4 chipset. OK, so what is the big deal!? Well… After it completed its upgrade I rebooted the computer, only to watch in horror as grub would send me flying into the depths of BusyBox. Why? Well the new kernel used in 9.10 – linux-image-2.6.31-14 includes support for Nvida Raid often dubbed “Fake RAID”.
This new storage driver is loaded even if you have RAID disabled in the BIOS! So upgrading to 9.10 destroyed my workstation and all the data on it!
However this was not all bad. I took advantage of the new Nvida RAID support, rebooted went into my BIOS re-enabled it, booted off of the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD and simply installed from scratch. After my new Ubuntu 9.10 install loaded in its new home on the Nvida RAID array, I recovered my data from a USB External Drive, and reinstalled my programs via a bash shell script.
So please take a hint of advice from one Ubuntu novice to another. If you have an Nvida chipset which supports RAID, please don’t upgrade. If you want the latest and greatest features do yourself the honor of backing up your data, enable RAID, and install a nice new fresh copy of Ubuntu.
Upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10
October 29, 2009
Hello everyone!
I know we are all excited about the upcoming stable release of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” on 10/30/2009. If you are currently running 9.04 then you can upgrade by pressing:
ALT+F2
This bring up the Run Application Prompt where you can type
upgrade-manage -d
as shown in the picture below.
Then hit run. Up will come the upgrade manager window which may take a few seconds to fully load as it is updating all the package source index files from their various locations out on the Internet. Once fully loaded it will tell you that it has picked up a new distribution release “9.10″. Simply hit the update button and the process will take pace.
NOTE
Please sit tight until the update manager gets the point where it is ready to start download packages. Prior to this step you may be prompted that a software package will not survive the upgrade or that it will have to remove a package source from the sources.list file located in
/etc/apt/
These prompts will require user input. I did run into a problem during my upgrade which put the brakes on. This was due to the fact that I had ksplice installed which hot patches the kernel (so you can do kernel patching w/o a reboot). I first had to remove the package and the open the sources.list file manually in gedit using sudo and remove the package source for ksplice. Happy upgrading, leave a comment if you run into an issue!
