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Oh no! Something has gone wrong. Ubuntu upgrade 21.04 to 21.10 fails - here's how to fix it.

19 October 2021

I recently upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 21.04 to Ubuntu 21.10. Unfortunately it failed with the message:

Oh no! Something has gone wrong.
A problem has occured and the system can't recover. Please log out and try again.

This sounded like it would leave the system unusable, but by switching to a terminal and booting into recovery mode I managed to fix this. This is explained in the video below:

This is a summary of the commands that I issued:

New terminal:
Ctrl-Alt-F3
Check that the upgrade wasn't running

Boot into recovery mode with root shell
Configure the packages that were partially installed
dpkg --configure -a

Fix broken packages
apt --fix-broken install

Restart the upgrade
apt upgrade

Install Displaylink Drivers (see below).

Use Ubuntu upgrade tool

Install Firefox
sudo snap install firefox

Or to continue with debian dpkg firefox (faster startup)
sudo apt install firefox

Oh no! Something has gone wrong. Ubuntu upgrade fail

Installing Displaylink Driver for USB-C video display

Also see the following video for how to install the DisplayLink drivers on Ubuntu (21.04+).