Install followed by delete destroyed the entire system

[lucian303]

I installed a new kernel, didn't reboot, then deleted it as I changed my mind. After reboot the system was somehow running the new kernel (in emergency mode) but had no kernel modules. Deleting the kernel obviously didn't work and it completely destroyed the system. It's not the expected result.

[bkw777]

Unlikely, since all we do is run dpkg, not even with any force options. It's unlikely dpkg actually failed that badly. But if it did, it did, then collect the screenshots of the dpkg error messages and complain to debian or ubuntu or whoever supplies your dpkg.

Except, I can tell you that my own system was hosed a few days ago, by dpkg actually, but only because ubuntu 24.04 upgrade is a complete disaster. They upgraded python and all the system's own python scripts broke, including apt & dpkg scripts. Perhaps you hit the same thing.

If you can reproduce it in a vm or something I'd be interested. Otherwise, I already install/remove all the time, so not sure what else I could do.

There is some safety-check code to avoid removing either the kernel that's currently running no matter what even if you try to select it explicitly, just for convenience and sane experience. It shouldn't actually even matter and be perfectly safe even without that because dpkg itself shouldn't remove the last kernel, so it shouldn't even matter if that safety check didn't work. But I'll try forcing it just to see what happens.

[lucian303]

It might be unlikely, but it is what happened. The system booted with the installed and then deleted kernel, which I verified multiple times, but it was missing virtually everything else so couldn't mount fs or do much anything useful. It booted into a kernel that should not have existed since I deleted it before rebooting. I don't see how else the kernel (6.12) that I installed and then deleted would be running on my machine with all its support missing. It certainly didn't come from the distro itself or from anywhere else. Anyway, I'm just reporting that it can and does happen and considering no other kernels were installed/removed in any way, I'm completely sure this was the cause of the system failure. The installed and deleted kernel did not get fully deleted and it was still partially installed, which by itself wouldn't have been a problem, but it was also set to boot into this kernel which led to the issue of running a kernel that couldn't mount anything since some iso character page and probably a ton of other things were missing (IO charset iso8859-1 not found).

[bkw777]

Which distro, version and kernel?

[lucian303]

I'm using pop os 22.04. I think the working kernel was 6.9 but I don't have the rest of the version number as I've already wiped the machine and reinstalled.