I was excited for the Karmic Koala (v. 9.10) which came out yesterday and I happily started the download and kept the computer switched on overnight for the download to complete. When I woke up, surely the download was completed and I went on to install the downloaded packages. Which the installation was taking place, power went off and computer switched off abruptly. I was in shock and feared I wouldn’t be able to boot into Ubuntu again.

My fears came true when booting process stopped at “waiting for /dev/sda6″. I waited for quite a while but it would never proceed to next step. I pressed Esc and I was dropped into root terminal. I at once did

dpkg --configure -a

That didn’t help much. It gave me error “Read-only file system”. So, I made the file-system writable by doing

mount -n -o remount,rw -t ext3 /dev/sda7 /

where
-n = dont write to /etc/mtab because the system is already read-only
-o remount,rw = remount the filesystem in read-write (rw) mode
-t ext3 = this is explicitly specifying the type of filesystem the root folder has. It is optional
/dev/sda7 = partition which is meant to be mounted
/ = location to mount it upon

After, this I again executed

dpkg --configure -a

I didn’t get any errors this time. It took around 2-3 minutes to reconfigure all the settings automatically. Then, I installed the not-installed packages of Karmic by executing

sudo aptitude install

Then, I rebooted the computer and voila!, I booted into Karmic.

Cheers!