I'm stuck between 11.10 and 12.04 with only a read only system

Question

I was trying to update to 12.04LTS from 11.10 and went out of the room. When I came back my laptop went into sleep mode. I assume that it was half way through updating something. The screen would be black but would flash up with my background if I moved the mouse or pressed a key on the keyboard.

I restarted my computer and when I booted up the Ubuntu partition I was told that 'GLIBC_2.14' is not found and is needed for '/lib/libply.so.2'. Then I was booted into some kind of recovery shell (I've forgotten exactly what it is called). From where I tried to see if the system could just pick up where the upgrade left off. I typed 'do-release-upgrade -d' but simply go something close to '[Errno 30] Read Only file system when trying to access '/root/.cache/update-manager-core'' (Note note the exact wording).

From where I went onto the windows partition (everything seems as normal). Then went back to Ubuntu in recovery mode and tried to recover packages with dpkg. It ran and said that to fix some problems I would need to manually run 'dpkg --configure -a'. I went to the recovery shell and tried this and got that I couldn't do it because of a 'Read-only file system'.

I'm running a HP Pavilion dv6 which started with windows 7 and I added Ubuntu on after a while. Note that sudo doesn't do anything in the recovery shell.

Any help would be welcome, Thanks.

Answer 1

boot into the recovery shell again and mount -o remount,rw / that will remount the filesystem read/write. Then you can try to repair your system.

Answer 2

I don't know how to respond using the account I used to ask the question but I used the command that ruediger suggested and it worked fine. If anyone is interested I then used apt-get install -g and this sorted everything out. There my be a little bug with updating but nothing that breaks my computer, Thanks.