@TowerGuy74 Wow, that is a bad problem indeed!
First of all, I’d like to reassure you that user data is almost definitely not impacted, and in the worst case could be retrieved by booting a live USB and mounting the internal hard drive. Hopefully we’ll be able to figure out a way to get you back up and running without that, but let us know if you need instructions for such a data recovery procedure.
Second, I’m pretty confident that the upgrade of the OS itself to 3.1.2 is safe. We’ve done a lot of testing on many hardware models, and even after reading your report I verified the OS upgrade from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2 on a laptop that I had not yet updated. Unless there is a driver compatibility issue specific to the Dell Optiplex (which would be much more likely to show up on initial install rather than after an upgrade), I don’t think the problem here was with the OS upgrade per se.
Third, this is the first report we’ve received of such a problem.
That said, obviously something really bad has happened, and we would like to figure out just what went wrong.
You mention installing “31 updates”. That implies to me that you were in the app center, saw that there were 31 updates available, and then hit the “update all” button. Is that correct? And, to be completely clear, the initial problem happened while waiting for the app updates, not upon rebooting, correct?
If so, I suspect this is an issue with app updates rather than the OS update. Of course, it does not make the issue any less of a concern for you, but it is an important distinction in understanding the root of the problem. Along with the OS release, we published a number of app updates, so even you did not update the operating system you would see a number of app updates available.
Do you know which version of the OS you had installed originally, and which version of the OS you were running before the problem?
Did you have the machine in a dual-boot configuration, or had you completely replaced Windows on the machine with Endless? If dual-boot, do you know how much of the available hard disk space you had allocated to Endless?
Had you manually upgraded the OS to 3.1.2 (via Settings → Details → Check for updates now)? Had you received a notification that updates were installed and you should now restart the computer? If you had not upgraded the OS itself to 3.1.2, again it sounds like something likely went wrong during the app updates.
I’m wondering if there is any possibility that in trying to install multiple updates at the same time there is some way that the disk became full, and now every time you log back in the update process tries to continue and again fills the disk. Or, perhaps even if the disk is not full, something else is stuck in the process of trying to resume the app updates.
If by any chance you can get to a console window by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F2 (or perhaps Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F2 depending on your keyboard), please log in as your user, and then try a few things…
grep VERSION /etc/os-release
This will be helpful as we can see whether the OS itself was upgraded or not
df -h
See if the disk appears full
top
See if any process is consuming a lot of CPU cycles
killall gnome-software
To kill the app center in case it is stuck trying to complete app updates
Then, try Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F1) to get back to the normal graphical interface
Please let us know any further details you can, and let us know if you are able to run any of the commands I suggest in a console window. In the meantime, we’ll see if we can reproduce a problem starting with an older version of the OS and updating all apps.
Thanks!
Roddy
