A couple weeks ago I noticed Ubuntu 10.04 had been released. I didn’t take notice until last week that it was a new LTS (Long Term Support) release which gets 5 years of updates unlike the normal bi yearly releases. I figured it was a good time to upgrade then. I first tried a work server and the upgrade was pretty much flawless. I had hoped it to be the same at home. The upgrade on my home server completed without any errors, but the problem happened after the reboot. The system hung on the starting up screen and gave no indication to any error whatsoever. I messed around with Grub a bit, but still couldn’t get the system to boot.
The only thing I could think of that might have been a problem was my raid 1 configuration of my hard drives using mdadm. I looked into it and sure enough others had similar issues even with older distributions after an upgrade. After roughly 3 or 4 hours, of trying to find a way around it and being able to get my system to boot again, I gave up. I decided I might as well go ahead and do a clean install of 10.04. At least this would let me clean up the system a bit.
The first thing I did was get all of my files onto an external hard drive. I did this by using a Ubuntu Live CD, so I had basically 0 data loss. I then booted up the Ubuntu server disc, erased and reset up my raid, and installed like normal. The system booted up just fine. Over the last 3 days, I’ve been reconfiguring everything and I pretty much have all my websites operational again. I still have a few things to set up behind the scenes, but for the most part everything is back to how it should be.
The whole thing has been a headache, but hopefully I’m good again for a few more years.