On 10/23/2013 06:10 PM, David wrote:
Not saying that you did ... but I have always had a problem with
advice
that starts out with "try this" and ends with "it might work". :-)
When it comes to fixing upgrades that don't work, the first piece of
advice should be to make sure that you have a recent backup, and if you
don't, do what you can to preserve as much of your data as possible.
(If you can't, that too is a learning experience, but one we'd rather
you don't go through.) And, the whole idea of "it might work"
suggestions is that if they do work, it's faster than a reinstall and if
it doesn't, all you've lost is time. And of course, if this is a
production machine and time is the one thing you don't have, a clean
install may well be your only choice.
One of the problems with this type of support is that those of us
offering help only have a limited knowledge of your situation and in
many cases, it's hard to narrow things down enough to be sure that what
you tell somebody to do is the right thing. Thus, you sometimes have to
tell them how to recover, provided that you've guessed right about what
happened, and hope that your guess wasn't too far off. That's why I'll
sometimes ask questions about odd possibilities: I'm trying to narrow
down the choices. (As an example, I'll often ask questions about
hardware because it can save lots of time if that turns out to be the
issue, and doesn't really waste any if it isn't.)