What to do after a system crash during dnf upgrade

[George R Goffe]

Hi,

Running dnf upgrade during periods of system instability seems to leave the system in an unknown state.

How does one recover from this situation?

Best regards,

George...

[stan]

On Sun, 29 Jan 2023 02:40:58 +0000 (UTC)
George R Goffe via test  wrote:
> Running dnf upgrade during periods of system instability seems to
> leave the system in an unknown state.
>
> How does one recover from this situation?

I assume you are on rawhide, since you are asking on the test list.
Rawhide is a lot more stable than it used to be, but there is still
a risk when recovering from these kinds of errors. That is part of
running rawhide.  Have you backed up any unique information, so that if
you have to do a reinstall, you won't lose anything?

Generic response.
First thing, just try rerunning the update command,
dnf update
If that doesn't work, try running 
dnf distro-sync
That should examine the state of the system, and correct any errors. It
won't correct for hardware errors, or power failure in the middle of an
update.
If it still isn't working, try
dnf --allowerasing distro-sync
If it still isn't working, try
rpm --rebuilddb
and then 
dnf --allowerasing distro-sync

Or, before you try anything, respond with more information, so the
response is less generic and more geared to your situation.  
What were you doing?
What kind of system instability?
What happened, the details?  Were there error messages, what were they?
You can log error messages to a file called error.txt by adding
2> error.txt
to the dnf command.

It might be that you have to manually remove some packages, or get
packages from koji in order to manually install them.  Depending on the
error, it might only require excluding packages with conflicts from
update, allowing the rest of the package updates to proceed.  This
isn't uncommon after the mass rebuild of all packages, since some fail
to build, and cause dependency errors.

[Michael Hennebry]

On Sun, 29 Jan 2023, George R Goffe via test wrote:
> Running dnf upgrade during periods of system instability seems to leave the system in an unknown state.
>
> How does one recover from this situation?

I believe the standard advice is to make a backup and reinstall.
Making a backup likely involves booting from a CD or a USB stick.

[Sérgio Basto]

On Sun, 2023-01-29 at 02:40 +0000, George R Goffe via test wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Running dnf upgrade during periods of system instability seems to
> leave the system in an unknown state.
>
> How does one recover from this situation?

checkdupes:
package-cleanup --dupes

package-cleanup --problems

dnf remove --duplicated

checkdeps (this is more for corrupted file systems I guess)
rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
> Best regards,
>
> George...
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