So let’s say you tried, like a genius, to upgrade to 16.04, because you were having USB problems that may and may not be related to the upgrade to 14.04 that puked all over itself and that you went in and spent several hours fixing by hand. And that has of course failed even more spectacularly, leaving you with a machine that does boot, but has no networking and package dependency hell that nothing will fix and a bunch of corrupted packages and and and.
So now you’ve made a live DVD-ROM and started the “reinstall” operation from that, because hey, maybe that’ll work, and it’ll try to preserve your app configuration and HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA <cries>
First thing it does: Scans your system partition to see what apps might be there that it should keep, then deletes all the OS files so it can do a clean reinstall. Cool.
Second thing it does: Unmounts your system partition.
Third thing it does: Tries to remount your system partition that it just unmounted. Assumes said system partition (which, I remind you, it had just had mounted and working) is ext2, rather than the ext4 it actually is, go “oh wow hey this isn’t ext2 fuck if I know” and crap out, leaving you with a now utterly unbootable, no-OS non-install, a need to hard-reboot the machine, and a need to rebuild the hard drive.
Who do I need to kill to get some killing around here?
solarbird submitted this to i-hate-ubuntu