Having had pretty good success with Ubuntu in place upgrades in the past, I figured I'd give it another go from 11.10 to 12.04. So much for the winning streak... the upgrade completely hosed my install and seemed to know it was having problems pretty early on and merrily proceeded from step to step without taking a breath until it was sure that it had accomplished its mission of nuking my system.

Unfortunately for me, I haven't had much experience trying to kill a major version upgrade like this while it is in process. Instead I got to sit and watch as things deteriorated as I couldn't even open up a terminal window once the upgrade started. So now I have an unusable system in an indeterminate state of upgrade. The errors were flying by so fast there's no point in even attempting to summarize what was going on during the install process. Suffice it to say that it decided it had enough with about 45 minutes remaining in the install when it stopped with the ominous line 'Processing was halted because there were too many errors' followed by it cleaning up (supposedly post-successful install) and rebooting me to a system that has very little working (no keyboard, mouse, networking, the login screen has several red 'X' icon placeholders) Lesson learned: I won't be using the Ubuntu upgrade process again for major versions but will instead perform clean installs.

Just a cautionary tale... now I'm off to rebuild my system. Thanks Ubuntu!