Kubuntu upgrade to 8.04 Hardy woes

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 install to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron. While I didn't have any specific feature that I thought I might need, I really wanted to see if an upgrade would help me access my digital camera which isn't terribly well supported in 7.10.

So, off I went and downloaded the alternate CD, mounted the ISO and proceeded with the upgrade. Everything more or less went smoothly. However, as per usual, the upgrader tried to be helpful by asking me whether I wanted to replace modified settings files (for my desktop, samba, privoxy and so on). It wasn't though. When the options are only to "keep" or to "replace", it doesn't help. I want a "merge" or something similar which would allow me to intelligently keep my custom changes intact and also benefit from any bug/security fixes or features that are enabled in the new file. Or at the very least, allow for transparent backup options.

Anyway, that minor annoyance aside, the upgrade proceeded smoothly enough and I was asked to reboot at the end of it. I did.

Boom! I was greeted with a command prompt and a message saying that my ReiserFS partitions (on my PATA boot drive) could not be found. WTF! How could it even boot if it couldn't find my primary partitions? And I couldn't find them anywhere either. I thought another reboot might help and typed shutdown -r now to reboot, but instead of rebooting, it just exited the shell and brought up KDE and my login prompt.

WTF!

I reboot anyway and go through the same command prompt business and login to KDE. I open Konqueror and while it normally opens up a few commonly used folders in various partitions in different tabs, I got a few "missing directory" error messages. When I checked further, I found that two of my SATA (as opposed to the PATA partitions where Kubuntu was installed) were missing as well. Now, one of these actually contained my MP3s (all 104GB of them, all backed-up of course). I was not happy.

So, all WTF-y, I went to the Kubuntu system settings applet and looked under discs and filesystems to see what the problem was. Surprisingly enough, all my partitions were present (in terms of partition count). Looking at the device names and mount points however, I could see what the fuck-up was about. Something had decided to detect my PATA partitions as sda1, sda2 and so on instead of the usual hda1, hda2 etc. This meant that what was previously my sda1, sda2 etc. was now sdc1, sdc2 and so on and due to the fact that they lacked entries in my fstab, did not have a mount point and weren't being mounted automatically. My new sda? partitions were still using the mount points for my old sda? partitions which added to the confusion.

While trying to fix this by reassigning the mount points correctly (which fixed the issue), I found that the num lock on my keyboard was also fucked up. On was Off and vice versa :S

Not a happy camper atm... sigh. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", eh?