Score:0

Does sudo dpkg --reconfigure -a brick the system if it is interrupted?

in flag

After running sudo dpkg --reconfigure -a my system powered off and will not boot anymore. Here is the exact order of events:

  1. I ran a normal apt upgrade
  2. dpkg was interrupted, fix with sudo dpkg --reconfigure -a
  3. waiting
  4. Power outage, system suddenly shuts down
  5. System refuses to boot up

Just want to know if dpkg reconfigure messes with my ssd and if it gets interrupted during that, does that leave the ssd in a non readable state?

I tried booting with a live USB and could not find my ssd at all.

user535733 avatar
cn flag
If your SSD is truly dead, and you are speculating about the likely cause, there are many possible causes...and many possible coincidences. If Ubuntu destroyed hardware, we would not use it. If you can *reliably demonstrate* that dpkg, under certain unusual conditions, causes hardware damage...that would be unintended behavior (also known as a bug).
Score:0
in flag

Assuming you mean dpkg --configure not dpkg --reconfigure, since the latter doesn't exist, and dpkg-reconfigure lacks a -a option.

In general, power outages while preforming major system administration tasks run the risk of nasty problems. Configuring a lot of packages is one of those tasks, and (espeically if the packages involved are used in early boot), can result in a broken (though not bricked) system.

However, the worst that should result is an unbootable disk: files not being edited generally shouldn't experience corruption, and under no circumstances should the disk become invisible to a rescue USB. Now, it's possible (if the stars aligned just wrong) that your power outage hit while, say, GRUB was updating something in the partition table, and wound up hiding the filesystems from the rescue disk. What does the lsblk command output when you run it from the rescue boot?

ramtex02 avatar
in flag
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT loop0 7:0 0 2G 1 loop /rofs loop1 7:1 0 55.5M 1 loop /snap/core18/1988 loop2 7:2 0 219M 1 loop /snap/gnome-3-34-1804/66 loop3 7:3 0 51M 1 loop /snap/snap-store/518 loop4 7:4 0 64.8M 1 loop /snap/gtk-common-themes/1514 loop5 7:5 0 31.1M 1 loop /snap/snapd/11036 sda 8:0 1 28.7G 0 disk └─sda1 8:1 1 28.7G 0 part /cdrom
ramtex02 avatar
in flag
sorry for the formatting, but in short, my 512GB SSD does not show up here
Calum McConnell avatar
in flag
In future, you can use a pastebin to dump text data like that. It's much quicker, and preserves important formatting. Are any wires in your computer lose? Any messages in the system log about a hard drive error? Even with a severe issue, the hard drive should still show up on lsblk.
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