Ubuntu Upgrade failed — Should I reinstall?

Ubuntu, you have let me down in a most heinous way.

For months, your update manager has been telling me to upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. When 8.04 came out, you didn’t offer me a direct upgrade path to the very latest, I had to upgrade one version at a time.

The upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 took about 5 hours and a handful of prompts about keeping configuration changes.

I figured I might as well open the update manager and upgrade again to 8.04 LTS.

Everything was running fine, for another 5+ hours (I went to bed), and I got up, answered a few more prompts about configuration files, and then suddenly the upgrade program crashed just before the ‘clean up’ stage, so now I don’t know if the upgrade process is finished enough to continue, or if I need to install from scratch all over again.

There’s no documentation I can find that tells me how to manually download and run the upgrader again or what needs to be finished, etc.

I’m *so* tempted to go back to Gentoo … I’ll need to go re-read my own blog to see why I gave on Gentoo last time. Given the state of my hard drives lately, I’m tempted to buy another 1TB drive and install on that, use the other 1TB just for backups, and take the other mid-size drive (I think it’s 500) and reserve that just for Windows (I still dual-boot to play a game or two every 6 months).

More later, I need to use my fancy Ambir DocketPORT 465 to scan my office documents into PDF format, to clean up the office paper load here at home. I’ll post later on some Linux-based PDF-OCR scanning packages from CPAN that work *really* well.