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I wanted to repair my system using live USB. In 12.04 Installation, there is no keep my files and repair the system only option (Which was introduced in 12.10).

I went with the normal steps. The system has finished installing and was installing my previous packages. The terminal log was something like this: 

Restoring previously installed packages...
Ubuntu ubiquity: warning:root: cannot add XXXXX* (Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages)

* This includes: x11, ubuntu fonts, thunderbird, empathy, ...etc.

I ended up with a paralysed install. My mouse didn't move and basically all essential drivers, fonts and anything else important was missing.

How do I correctly repair my system using 12.04 live USB while avoiding the loss of the drivers and such (Including my installed packages as well)?

P.S: I forget I posted the same thing 4 months ago. Both repairs led to the same result.

Zanna
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egy
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1 Answers1

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By "keep my files" are you referring to everything in your home folder? If you backed up / copied your home folder somewhere else, then you could do a (fresh) re-install from the live usb, and once it's up & running then create your user again (adduser or useradd) copy your home folder back and be up & running again. Or if your home folder was on a different partition you'd already be half done now.

There are some settings that aren't kept in your home, like /etc/fstab or any custom PPA's or repo's in /etc/apt/sources.list & sources.list.d (but don't just copy those straight over if you move to a different release / version).

I just saw a Q on how to save the list of installed packages/programs, but most methods will list every package including dependencies, libraries, etc. Some methods should list only the main/top packages (since installing them will automatically install their dependencies) and make it easier if you later want to remove a package and it's unneeded dependencies.
apt-mark showmanual sounds like a good one
aptitude search '~i!~M' but it showed everything installed with a fresh install too.

See this answer (and all the answers there) for more info, but these require at least terminal access to your system... maybe chroot from a live usb/cd but I'm not sure about that.

I don't know which drivers you're thinking of, but for a new install you'll probably have to install the drivers again anyway, so do whatever you did last time to install them, hopefully they're in a repo/PPA or easy to find mfg. website (maybe they're updated by now too, or you still have the install files saved?).

I don't know offhand how to fix what's wrong now, but re-installing is a "nuclear option" that should wipe out all the errors...

Community
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Xen2050
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