I tried upgrading from 23.04 to 24.04 via the Software Updates app. However, the GUI started bugging and now my installation is broken (according to a reply I got here, the upgrade path the GUI proposed was invalid). After troubleshooting this for a whole day, I think reinstalling may be the only option.
I have a Live USB with 24.04 on it. According to fdisk, I have a 23.10 boot with corresponding filesystem (probably left over from the broken installation). Is it possible to reinstall Ubuntu such that I can keep at least my home directory? I know where the boot and filesystem is for the existing installation (fdisk lists them).
I also looked at this tutorial:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuReinstallation
But it's from I think 2012 and may not be up to date (reading outdated official instructions is how I broke my installation after all). I do not see the same options it tells me to look for. In particular, there's no "Something-else" option. I can reach a point where I can choose to partition or manually allocate the disk, however, I'm not sure what to do at that point and don't want to risk accidentally making things worse. I'm not a very technical user so I am not familiar with this process. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT:
Firstly, I appreciate the comments. Thanks for the help. I think I will need to clean reinstall and then attempt to restore my backup. However, to document why and to add more details:
Background
I was not clear about which Ubuntu product I'm using, mostly because I didn't even know which were available (that's how much of a beginner I am). I'm using a Desktop installation, not Server, and for the installers I used for the Live USB, I grabbed the images from:
- 24.04: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop (ubuntu-24.04-desktop-amd64.iso)
- 23.10.1: https://releases.ubuntu.com/mantic/ (ubuntu-23.10.1-desktop-amd64.iso)
I am using 23.10.1 because I could find it on the Canonical Ubuntu website. There may be a 23.10 somewhere, but I read it was withdrawn and didn't want to use anything I couldn't verify the checksum of.
I found the instructions I used to attempt to upgrade my 23.04 system here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/upgrading-ubuntu-desktop#1-before-you-start
I didn't specifically pick 24.04, I just followed the tutorial and used the Software Updates app GUI to search for an upgrade. It showed me 24.04 was available, so I clicked "upgrade". From what guiverc told me in another question, this is an invalid upgrade path, and I should have gone for 23.10. Perhaps this was attempted, since I now have a broken 23.10 installation. However, whatever happened, after the reboot, it would only boot into UEFI. I did not run any commands. From the tutorial, it seemed the GUI was the official way to upgrade, so that's what I did.
I have a back up of my Home directory which was created just before the upgrade attempt, using whichever is the tool on the right-click context menu.
Lastly, I'm using a DELL laptop, which shall be important for a bug with Live USBs.
Attempted Solutions
- I tried adjusting the boot sequence on the UEFI.
- I made a Live USB using the 24.04 image (listed above) and tried to reinstall, since I had heard before that you can install Ubuntu without losing your home directory, however I didn't see the option. On this point, if you are using Rufus to create the Live USB, I noticed 23.10.1 and 24.04 appear to get stuck in an infinite loop on the DELL logo. This is apparently specific to DELL machines and fixed if you create it using DD mode. According to the Rufus devs on this question, this is due to a driver issue.
- Neither 23.10.1 nor 24.04 show the option to reinstall.
- From the Live USB, I tried running boot repair tool.
- I tried reinstalling Grub by mounting the root and boot partitions of my broken 23.10 on the Live USB, using
fdiskto list the partitions to know which is which. This created a new EFI file, but the behaviour was the same, so probably something is wrong with the installation itself.
Duplicate Question
As mentioned in the comments, this is probably a duplicate of:
How to reinstall Ubuntu in the easiest way?
The marked answer is outdated for the release I'm using, however, on the comments under guiverc's answer, and in guiverc's comments here, it appears that for 23.10 and 24.04, re-installing is not possible with the images I have. I am not familiar with the development, so I do not know why this is, but maybe it will re-enabled in the future. As is, however, there may be alternative ISOs (legacy ubiquity ISO for 23.10 and calamares for 24.04), however, I am not familiar with the calamares installer, so it may be safest to just clean install.
