Upgrade from Debian Squeeze to Stretch

[phongnguyen]

Dear all, I'm a Debian newbie, I have a question, hope you can help!
I want to upgrade from Debian 6 to 9, but see that error:
E: error, pkgproblemResolver:: Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages
Could you please guide me how I can do that?
thank you in advanced

[Thorny]

... I want to upgrade from Debian 6 to 9, ...
Could you please guide me how I can do that?

Such an upgrade has never been supported. It has always been necessary to step through the releases in order, so, 6 --> 7 --> 8 --> 9, the first step is fully upgrade before starting and Squeeze has already reached End of Life, Wheezy reaches it on May 31. It would take a long time even if you were successful. It would be a difficult process for a inexperienced user.
In my opinion, you would better off making a current backup of your important data, doing an install of the release that you want and then restoring your data from your backup.

[kopper]

How did you try to upgrade it so far? Give us:
1) Command(s) you tried to use.
2) Content of your /etc/apt/sources.list

Code: Select all

cat /etc/apt/sources.list

You cannot upgrade straight from Squeeze to Stretch. What you need to do is to upgrade one release at a time, i.e. Squeeze -> Wheezy -> Jessie -> Stretch. First, check that you have the latest packages for Squeeze installed. You should then replace "squeeze" to "wheezy" in /etc/apt/sources.list and use following commands:

Code: Select all

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
reboot

Same steps apply every time. Next upgrade Wheezy to the latest point release (e.g. for Wheezy, 7.11), and perform the steps above again. Do this until you get to Stretch.

Thorny beat me to it, but you are more likely to succeed if you just backup your data (which you should do anyway when you do this kind of upgrade) and do fresh reinstall with Stretch.

[Thorny]

Phongnguyen can benefit from seeing it from two sources, that makes it more credible. Others, just lurking and reading or seeing it later may also benefit.