How to repair Ubuntu installation after broken dist-upgrade without losing any custom settings?

Question

During my attempt to upgrade the Linux installation with...

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

...I made the mistake to interrupt the process by closing my laptop, which caused it to suspend to disk. After re-opening the monitor remained black, so I was forced to reboot the system. Until today I discovered many failures of drivers (wlan0 missing, USB memory stick cannot be mounted, USB mouse not recognised, and maybe more undiscovered problems with hardware). My beginner's attempts to manually repair the single problems could make it even worse. During the installation of the current distribution I've chosen to encrypt my whole hard disk.

tag: re-installation !

Answer 1

Try this:

Switch on your computer.

Press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up the Grub menu.

Select the line which starts with Advanced options.

Select the line ending with (recovery mode)

Press Return and your computer will begin the boot process.

Your computer should display a menu with a number of options.

One of the options will be Check all file systems. Press Return with this option highlighted.

Next, other of the options will be Enable networking. Press Return with this option highlighted.

Next, other of the options will be Drop to root shell prompt. Press Return with this option highlighted.

Your computer should boot in a terminal.

In the terminal, enter the commands:

mount -o remount,rw /
mount --all
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get update
apt-get -f install
apt-get -m install
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
apt-get autoremove
apt-get clean