Raspberry Pi Forums

I was updating Raspbian and, well, this happened.


I'm sure it's promtimg me to say yes to something with the '?' at the end, but I don't know whether to go on.
Anything I could do or will it be fine?
I would like your thoughts.

I would be quite happy if people even said that they haven't seen it and think that I should maybe do something.

Well, you have an interesting problem there. I think I can safely say I've never seen that exact issue.

Is this the first time you've seen this issue? Are you connected to the Pi using something like a USB to TTL serial cable? Perhaps remotely connected and using the program screen, ssh or anything else like that?

Did the characters on the screen appear to become corrupted out of nowhere in the middle of the upgrade?

FWIW, normally I enter the "D" option there to show a diff of the two config files before I decide whether I want to let it replace the existing config file or keep my current config file.

ktb wrote:Is this the first time you've seen this issue? Are you connected to the Pi using something like a USB to TTL serial cable? Perhaps remotely connected and using the program screen, ssh or anything else like that?

Did the characters on the screen appear to become corrupted out of nowhere in the middle of the upgrade?

This is the first time I have ever seen this issue. I am using the Pi with my keyboard, my SD card and my HDMI cable only.
The update was taking a while and I was watching TV because it was taking a while, I flicked back and got this screen.
That's all I can say.

I also pressed D, it was corrupted. The options appear to be Y/I/N/O/D/Z.

It probably got corrupted. If yes, then you'll have to reinstall Raspbian.

kusti8 wrote:It probably got corrupted. If yes, then you'll have to reinstall Raspbian.

Okay, I was thinking about that. I know how to do it. I don't have many important files, I might make a backup and just download the OS from the website. Thanks.

I might try using fsck, gparted or something else to see if I could repair any corruption issues in another PC running Linux. Starting fresh as kusti8 mentioned is probably a good idea and might be necessary after all. Who knows...

I managed to get through it. But, of course, the symbols are still corrupted.
I can't get into the desktop.

Time to Reinstall!!!

Oh well! Thanks for both of your help.
I hope this has been a bit interesting and not a total waste of your time.
Thanks for the effort and input.
¡Adiós!

The funny symbols are due to the terminal emulator being switched to its line-drawing character set. That can happen if binary data are accidentally printed to the terminal, and randomly contain control characters and/or escape sequences. If apt-get itself printed the binary data then that could indicate that you have corrupt files somewhere. The screenshot does not go back far enough to tell.

For future reference, the "reset" command puts the terminal right. In this case you would have needed to suspend apt-get first, so: Ctrl+Z reset ENTER fg ENTER.

The question was about the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. It could be just the autologin settings that differed. The errors further up about packages idle-python2.7 and libobt2 might be more serious.