reinstalled ubuntu 64bit on top of 32bit thinkpad X300

I have lenovo Thinkpad X300 running with 32bit and server kernel to see the full 4GB RAM bu i read that its beter to run 64bit since there are no issues with it and when i need to run any 32bit stuff i can compile them and run them

so i went ahead and downloaded the 64bit iso and started the installation, i choose the existing partitions to install the new OS on and during the installation i also choose to migrate my previous user.

something weird that my old kernels still show on grub including the server kernel etc.. and the bad thing is i cant boot using any of the installed kernels

when i booted with the recovery it reaches the USB part and hangs, and when i click control+alt+delete it says clearing scsi cache and reboots so its actually not hanged but waiting for something to happen

attached two pictures from my the screen taken via my mobile (sorry for the bad quality)

your advise is highly appreciated because i tend todo it on my other thinkpad W500 which i use it heavy for work and can't stand having it not working (thanks god i tested on the X300 first)

Best Regards

 

forgot to attach the pictures

 

FYI: i tried to disable USB from bios and booted it still hangs at the same line

 

i have waited and not rebooted and this messaged showed after the USB part:
[ 279.261024] CE: hpet increasing min_delta_ns to 15000 nsec

what does it mean ? is it related to the SSD disk ?

 

this was not a smart decision at all. You can install Ununtu 8.10 "on top" of Ubuntu 8.04 or any other Debian-based distro as long as they were compiled for the same CPU architecture (e.g. i386 or amd64), but you cannot install one architecture on top of the other. Now you have a lot of conflicts between libs, executables and kernel modules. Package-manager database is also a mess now.

The best thing to do at this point -- is to boot from a liveCD, backup your /home to an extrenal drive, format the harddrive and reinstall amd64 system from scratch.

 

why it did not overwrite all stuff when i did second installation ?

btw if it was originally 32bit 8.04 and i installed 64bit 8.10 it would written everything and worked just fine ?

 

I don't know, but do as newhren suggests. I always make a back up of my files to a flash drive or CD/DVD before I reinstall Linux. Hope you did that or can get the files from the disk now. Once this is done, get your Live CD and drop it in and run from it first to see how you like it. If it looks ok to you, go ahead and do a complete clean install by wiping out your partitions and recreate the partitions and install. I have Ubuntu 8.10 64 running on 2 different machines perfectly. One is on my 3.5 year old desktop with a AMD64 Athlon and the other is my Thinkpad T61p. Both run beautifully.

 

its a test machine so i would't really care about data i wanted to test the process to do it on the live machine

so on live machine i need to backup things, reformat, reinstall 64bit

thats really confusing, with FreeBSD i can just update source via cvsup then rebuild the entire system using makeworld it will get me everything brand new including libs, binaries etc..

i think this is not an option with linux _yet_

 

I think the reason you had difficulty was that the dependency system (apt, developed by Debian and used by Ubuntu) accounts for different versions of the S/W but not different architectures. In most cases S/W for different architectures cannot run on the same H/W. (Think Power PC vs. Intel vs. Sun H/W for example.) Intel 32 bit and 64 bit are an exception that H/W which can run 64 bit Intel binaries can also run 32 bit Intel binaries. APT would not know to upgrade binaries because they were the "old" architecture since they are still current WRT the new architecture.

Incidentally, I usually keep my home directory in a separate partition to make it easier to reinstall once in a while. I still have the important stuff backed up, but doing that lets me choose between reinstalling vs. having to update.

If you like to install source and compile your binaries, You should look at Gentoo Linux. I think that's the normal install routine there.

-hank