Upgrading Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04

For sometime now I have been wanting to update my desktop computer from Ubuntu 12.04 to 16.04. Knowing that sometimes an upgrade can go sideways. I waited till fall semester was over. Yesterday, being the first Monday after semester over, I decided to tackle the upgrade.

I downloaded the iso image and installed it onto a usb drive. The first glitch I came accross was a small one. When the machine booted from the usb drive rather than going to Ubuntu live I received an error.

Missing parameter in configuration file. Keyword: path
gfxboot.c32: not a COM32R image
boot :

The error is not a big problem all I had to do was type live and Ubuntu finished booting. The error is caused by a different versions of the fie syslinux in the iso compared to the machine creating the bootable usb drive.

I selected the install icon and the install was off and running. The install procedure I thought went off without a hitch. But to my suprise when I rebooted, I was taken to the grub rescue prompt. Something had happened to my grub configuation file. I did try to fix the issue from grub but to no avail.

After doing some searches I found boot-repair-disk. I installed the software onto a usb drive and rebooted. The software walked me through the grub repair and before I knew it my computer was booting properly.

Even with the issues, the upgrade went fairly smoothly and the new version of Ubuntu is running fine.