Wen Lin <vwenlin@gmail.com> wrote:
I had used a Live CD to boot the PC up and confirmed that all his data (/home) is in a separate partition, so a clean install of 12.04 will not loose his data completely. However, that would mean I have to spend lots more time re-installing all his extra programs, installing codecs, configuring his scanner, etc (that I'd spent many hours/days fine-tuning in the previous 11.10 install).
So my question to the LUV'ers out there, is there a way I can do to get back to his 11.10 version? Any tips will help as I have not done such rescue before.
I suppose you could copy /etc, /usr/local and any other relevant directories to a backup drive, chroot into the system and try to extract the list of installed packages with dpkg --get-selections \* > filename (see the recent thread on this list), save this on the backup disk, take a copy of /home just in case and install the upgraded distribution from the beginning. You can then copy over the needed config files, automatically install all the packages in the get-selections list you took, and basically do the customizing much more quickly. Even if the package databases are corrupt, you should still be able to salvage /etc and other crucial directories. It all depends on the exact state of the partially upgraded system and what has been overwritten.