[lug] problem compiling Ubuntu kernel

[Davide Del Vento]

Since you are reinstalling, let me give you my 0.02cent.
I always install from scratch, and I mean always. Updates sometimes
work, but when they don't it's much more painful, as you have
experienced here. I do the "install-from-scratch" without overwriting
the old system, so If anything goes wrong with the new, I can always
boot the old and be 100% productive.

So my recommendation is to plan ahead and use a partition scheme that
would make a full install easy in future. In my case that simply means
having a separate / and /home, plus something that I call /old. When I
install a new release, I install it on /old, which in the new
installation is becomes / (and the "old" / becomes /old). Probably
you'll need something more complex, but I'm sure you can figure that
our yourself. Note: I also be sure that the new installation does not
(over)writes in the "old" directories in /home, so I start with some
test usernames different from the "old" ones. Only when everything is
working fine, sometimes I allow the new installation to write into the
old homes (but some other times, I even decide that it's not worth
this risk, and I copy the settings and data by hand: slower, but more
control, less things that goes wrong and if any does easier to figure
out what it is).

You might see the slowness of this manual few-steps-at-a-time approach
as a drawback. It's not: the old installation is always just a reboot
away (yes, I can screw up the bootloader, but that's easy to fix with
a live disk from the old distro that I keep it handy from the
beginning of this "update"). And hopefully the old system was working
fine when I started, so there is no need to rush. And if I don't rush,
it's less likely that I make mistakes or try risky shortcuts "becase
it's late and I need this machine to be productive in half hour": the
machine is productive right now, if it's really needed by somebody.
With this workflow, a distro with very long overlap among subsequent
releases is highly desirable (mine is Ubuntu LTS), so there is even
another less reason to rush (the old distro will be supported for
months, no need to fix the new one this week, I can go to the beach
and relax as scheduled)

And yes, this approach require more disk space, but not much more
(most of my space is eaten by /home anyway), and in any case disk
space is very cheap today.

Hope this help you in future.
;Dav

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 11:03, bgiles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the help everyone but I'm calling the disk unrecoverable.  It
> doesn't make sense to keep putting effort into this when there's
> multiple problems and I can just reinstall the latest distro from
> scratch.  Reconfiguring the servers is a pain but will still only take a
> few hours.
>
> Bear
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