Fixing a borked upgrade

I tried going direct from Jessie to the newest Bookworm release on a GoFlex Home, that boots off the hard drive.

While trying to upgrade everything I was riding the waves of successes and failures.... until I somehow lost the ability to check passwords. Sudo just kept returning failure notices without me being allowed to enter a password.

I figured I'd try a reboot, but somehow ssh is no longer running so I cant connect. I know the machine is running because my router sees it.

Whats my best option for fixing this? I prefer to remove the HD and repair it on another computer (not sure if that possible). I do have serial access as I made a connector when I set it up. I dont have the drivers for it anymore, but Im sure I can figure out a way to communicate with it if need be.

I dont remember much else. I do have the OLD uBoot. I havent used this much in a long time, I was going to try and put pi-hole on it.

Thanks for any direction you could give me.

optim,

> I tried going direct from Jessie to the newest
> Bookworm release on a GoFlex Home, that boots off
> the hard drive.

That's too big a jump. Debian does not support skipping release. And you're skipping 2 releases!

> Whats my best option for fixing this? I prefer to
> remove the HD and repair it on another computer
> (not sure if that possible).

That's possible if you chroot into the HDD drive from another Linux OS. But it would take longer than using serial console to see what the problem and how far the boot process goes.

> I do have serial
> access as I made a connector when I set it up.

Your best bet is using serial console and watch the boot log to see where it stops.

> I dont remember much else. I do have the OLD
> uBoot.

Old u-boot is OK. Once the kernel starts booting, the problem is no longer in u-boot.

The problem is it might have been hosed beyond repair when you upgrade from Jesse to Bookworm. If you have a backup then restore it.

> know the machine is running because my router sees it

That's a good sign.

OTOH, if you only want to set up Pihole then you could also use a fresh rootfs. And try to salvage the old data files from the HDD. Use a new USB rootfs to boot the box first (If you have serial console then I'd expect it to be easy). Then insert and mount the HDD.

-bodhi
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I guess I'll spend the weekend trying to get this fixed up. I will report back on what I did to fix er up.

Thanks for the direction.