I tried to upgrade my recovery partition today and it failed with “No such device”/OS error 19.

I found this discussion on Reddit in which @mmstick suggested restarting, but with no explanation as to why that was needed or would work. It worked for me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/xun8vu/error_updating_recovery_partition_no_such_device/

I’d like to know why it worked and why it was needed, mostly for two reasons: to generally understand the situation better and to imagine what I might have been able to do that didn’t require restarting.

Thanks.

  • @jbrainsOPEnglish
    1•11 months ago

    I understand the general concept.

    I have also upgraded the recovery partition on this machine every 3 months for over 3 years before needing to reboot to make it work this time. I’m curious what might account for the difference.

    Also, I’m not sure how upgrading a recovery partition constitutes updating a running system. I had not booted from the recovery partition. I was not running anything from the recovery partition.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•11 months ago

      Did you check if the recovery partition was recognised and mounted? Maybe some voodoo made it fail to mount, but it worked after a reboot.

      • @jbrainsOPEnglish
        1•11 months ago

        Yes, it was. I checked by unmounting it, then running the upgrade command, which resulted in a clear error message about the partition not being mounted. I don’t remember the specific message, but I remember it was different than the one I got when it was mounted. This leads me to believe that the OS error 19 message is some kind of red herring.

        Thanks.