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For the last few hours, my upgrade window to 12.04 has been stalled at configuring lswh. The top of the terminal window says

irqbalance start/running

There's a fairly long line of errors in the terminal like

error cannot seek /dev/sdc,

most of them coming after the "Generating grub.cfg". A the very bottom of the terminal it says Found Ubuntu 8.04.2 on /dev/sdb3 and then "done" on the final line.

Reading other threads on freezes during upgrade1 gives me some hope I can open another terminal window and fix this and continue with the upgrade, but I haven't found what that command might be. I found some leads here where lshw hangs:

  • bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lshw/+bug/218864

But the solution assumes I can just run a patch, which I can't don in the middle of an upgrade.

These two issues:

seem to suggestion killing or disabling the os-prober, but I'm not sure if I can do that mid-upgrade.

Any suggestions for fixing this?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

CTRL-C the upgrade, do whatever you want to do, then dpkg --configure -a to restart it.

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No, the files should be okay - use sudo! Hmm strange... I would recommend backing up important files or moving them, and doing a fresh install - dist-upgrades cause a lot of problems when they go wrong. – whiskers75 Jul 28 '12 at 17:54
    
Thanks for your help, whiskers75. I used sudo to make the change and it worked. Then I tried the dpkg --configure -a to restart it and go "error: dpkg status database is locked by another process". It seems simply hitting ctrl+c in the dist-upgrade window didn't work. How do I kill the dist-upgrade process from another terminal? – Tim Nafziger Jul 28 '12 at 18:13
    
pkill apt-get and pkill dpkg. – whiskers75 Jul 28 '12 at 18:15
    
okay, the pkill worked and I was able to run 'dpkg --configure -a'. Now I run into a whole string of "dependency problems - leaving unconfigured" that conclude with "Processing was halted because there were too many errors." – Tim Nafziger Jul 28 '12 at 18:43
2  
I should add that the key change I made to the system files that's not listed above was "The workaround I finally found (somewhere on Ubuntu forums, I think) was to append this line to the bottom of /etc/default/grub: GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true" from eyemeansit.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/… – Tim Nafziger Jul 28 '12 at 20:44

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