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Well, with massive thanks to Brad on tech support, it’s now fixed and working.
The solution was to comment out the ffmpeg and dropbox repos.
I’m kicking myself for not trying that about 6 hours ago, but I’d read so many things suggesting that “bad” third party repos wouldn’t affect upgrade, and also all the lines with
"Err http://mirrors.digitalocean.com"
and the part about "no valid mirror" got me off on a totally wrong direction, especially as I’ve been using those repos before on previous years’ upgrades and had no trouble.
There you go - day wasted, lessons learnt!
The “No valid mirror found” error can be safely ignored. do-release-upgrade only looks at list of “official” Ubuntu mirrors, which doesn’t include DigitalOcean’s. Though the mirrors do include 14.10:
http://mirrors.digitalocean.com/ubuntu/dists/utopic/
Have you tried commenting out or disabling the third-party repositories that are erroring? I just successfully did a 14.04 to 14.10 upgrade on a new droplet.
I’ve got other weirdness now.
Plenty of W: Failed to fetch mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt/dists/utopic/main/binary-i386/Packages 403 Forbidden [Mirror: http://ubuntu.serverspace.co.uk/ubuntu/]
Any ideas?