After unsuccesfull upgrade/restart the system is locked

[miro_ilias]

Dear all,

I wanted to do (today) the upgrade of my Debian Sid. During upgrade (with Synaptic) I got crash with remark that I have to finish packages installation properly with :"dpkg --configure -a".

After the restart (as the root) in the text mode, however, I found that the entire system is read-only and completely locked (for root).

The /etc/fstab file contains "defaults,errors=remount-ro" for /dev/sda1, I can not change it in read-only mode. When I discarded "errors" in fstab through CD live, it did not help.

The mesage from dpkg: unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system

Any help is appreciated. Miro

[smallchange]

Restore fstab to the way it was. After you login as root run

Code: Select all

mount -o remount /dev/sda1

It will remount in read-write mode. If your hard disc is failing it will immediately remount it in read-only mode. Look in /var/log/syslog to see if there are disc hardware errors being reported.

[miro_ilias]

Restore fstab to the way it was. After you login as root run

Code: Select all

mount -o remount /dev/sda1

It will remount in read-write mode. If your hard disc is failing it will immediately remount it in read-only mode. Look in /var/log/syslog to see if there are disc hardware errors being reported.

Excellent ! It worked ! Using Debian Live CD I restored fstab, then I removed CD, did reboot and "mount -o remount ..." restored the partition.

Afterwards "dpkg --configure -a" did further jov of restoration of broken packages.

Many thanks.

[mzilikazi]

For future reference, never use Synaptic to do an upgrade. Use the command line instead.