Broken upgrade repair

Yesterday I prepared to upgrade from Ubuntu 12.10 to 13.10, but something went wrong during the upgrade and my computer got restarted in the middle of the process (at the point of installing packages).

Now I have a unusable state of system (I still can use the command line version of Ubuntu). How can I repair this state to fully upgrade to 13.10 without losing data?

Solution 1:

The only upgrade candidate you have from Ubuntu 12.10 is Ubuntu 13.04 which is End of Life. That is the reason why your upgrade failed. Fixing it is rather involved, however you have another chance to make things right. In another two days on April 17 Ubuntu 14.04 will be released. Then you can back up all your personal data by running an Ubuntu live DVD or USB and install Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 will be a Long Term Support release that will be supported by updates until April, 2019.

In response to your question, since Ubuntu 13.04 is End of Life you can skip over Ubuntu 13.04 when upgrading. The instructions for how to do that are found in the answers to the question: Can I skip over releases when upgrading?. However to take this upgrade path you would first have to fix your problem of being stuck in the command line, so once again it would be easier and more fun for you to wait until Ubuntu 14.04 is released and then do a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04.