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System: Lenovo ThinkPad x121e (intel), LVM based setup with separate root, var, and home filesystem. var getting somewhat tight due to the packages downloaded and kept for the upgrade.

During the upgrade from 13.10 to 14.04, the upgrade process failed to continue. From output and processes around, it seems to be hanging in update-grub. The last action observed was logged as "installed dbus-x11".

It's been stuck since hours - how to proceed?

/var/lib/dpkg is locked

/var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked (hanging update-grub process)

  1. HUP the update-grub and hope for upgrade to continue, run update-grub later on manually
  2. HUP the upgrade, and hope it is either reentrant or successful at reestablishing prior conditions.
  3. if all else fails, it'll take longer...

Due to filesystem sizes on the Notebook, I'd rather avoid the full install - reinstall packages - revert to backup procedure, even though the result would be clean and preferrable. It's the obvious if-all-else-fails fallback, but I'm also curious on how graceful the update process can be salvaged.

Any ideas?

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Since noone seemed to have had a better idea, I went ahead and killed the update-grub that was stuck. It didn't take a HUP, so it got a SIGKILL. The parent process didn't notice (oops. No return values?) and continued. There have been enough update-grubs and several runs of building an initramfs, so the lapse probably shouldn't matter, unless it was indicative of another problem. Currently it's mostly finished, setting out to remove packages it no longer wants. I'll update where it ends up at.

Update: The upgraded system rebooted just fine. For some strange reason it insists on booting the oldest kernel still on /boot, though, ignoring all glorious progress of the years between.

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