Server Upgrade

Well, it has been a long time since I have written anything on the blog, I have been around and doing things.  Today I decided to upgrade the operating system on my server from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04, I prefer to stick to long term releases for my servers so that I don’t have to upgrade them every six months.  Well, it was bad upgrade.  I did the upgrade and rebooted the server and it did not want to boot.  I probably should have stopped at that point and found out what I needed to do to recover and get GRUB to boot, but I was lost and decided to just start over and install from scratch.  Well, almost scratch I did not delete the partitions, but I did format them.  Well, when the server rebooted after the fresh install it would only boot to the GRUB rescue prompt and no matter what I did I could not get past that point. I ever tried another almost fresh install to no avail.  After the third install attempt where I did delete all of the partitions and start over the server rebooted and started up just fine.  After a while I was able to restore most everything from the backups.  At this point all is looking good, but if you are going to upgrade be prepared for the worst case and make sure that you have good current backups.