Kubuntu 12.04 upgrade to 14.04 froze at 59% i8kutils

[irlandes]

I haven't been on much in a long time because I haven't had many problems. With mature distros such as Mint and Kubuntu, things mostly just work.

I bought a new Dell A860, must have been in late 2009 based on file properties in Windows Vista. I used it several years, then it had problems so I called Dell on my free service plan, and they put in a new keyboard and fan.

Eventually, one day it would not do anything when I turned it on. No lights. No fan. No sound of any kind. I took it back to the States and my SIL looked at it. Turns out something in the new keyboard caused complete death in the machine. He bought a Chinese keyboard at a modest price and it works now.

I updated sda5, which had Kubuntu 12.04 to latest status. Then, clicked on upgrade to 14.04. It downloaded all night, then started install which went on for hours. It froze solid at 59%, showing installing i8kutils or something very close. I left it an hour to be sure.

Now, it will not boot up on any Recovery option. Even fsck wants to lock up.

The first bit of good news is, I have a parallel distro on sda7, also Kubuntu 12.04 and can boot there. I did this based on something that happened years ago, and was able to move files across the HD partitions to fix the failed installation. So, I can access anything I wish on the sda5 installation.

The second bit of good news is over the year this was in the States, I got used to anything missing on this machine.

I am bringing sda7 up to the latest updates, but am sure at this time I am not going to do a distro upgrade, heh, heh.

I could just install a new distro in the partition. But, that doesn't seem to be very 'Linux' to me.

IF anyone has any ideas how to deal with a frozen distro upgrade, I am willing to give it a shot. If not, I may just let it sit there and think a lot.

Sometimes problems that seem complex are not.

Thanks for any tips, though not wishing to make work, I tend to like links to other similar fixable problems.