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downloading most recent upgrade was interrupted when my computer froze. I force quit and now it will not load for me. Message reads: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem. When I typed this in, the message I receive is: unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system.

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  • Thanks for your help and I'll cross my fingers that this will work.
    – Cindy
    May 4, 2012 at 16:25

1 Answer 1

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Looks like 2 things happened when you computer froze (what a bad timing!):

  • Some of your root partition got corrupted, and the disk needs to be checked.

  • Thus, Ubuntu mounted it in ready only, for safety. And that's why dpkg can't work properly.

So let's fix these issues, one at a time:

  • Boot using a Live CD / USB

  • Once in the Live Session, use gparted, disk tools, etc, to find what device your Ubuntu partition is. It will probably be /dev/sda1, but it can be different, specially if you dual boot with windows.

  • Now issue this command in the terminal:

    sudo fsck /dev/sdX0 (replace sdX0 for your actual device, like sda1)

Is it OK now? Great. Now for dpkg:

  • Reboot and, in grub menu, select recovery mode, and then, once it loads a menu (will take a while) drop to a root shell

  • Issue this command:

    mount -o remount,rw / && dpkg --configure -a

  • Reboot. You should be fine now.

If anything is still not fine after these steps, please describe all steps you did and what exactly error messages appeared (if any), and what is not working properly

Good luck!

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