Upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04

I’ve inherited a bit of a mess. let me say right up front that I’m a total noob with Linux. I’ve done some router work, but it’s been on the simpler side.

This site has been going down frequently, so the first thing I checked for was updates. It was running 16.04.2, and the login screen showed 341 packages needed updating, 184 of which were security updates (yikes).

So after reading some docs here, I got a snapshot taken, then ran sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade, followed by sudo apt autoremove. That all went great and I got it up to 16.04.7.

It looks though like 16.04.x is old hat, so I tried to upgrade to 18.04. using sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. During that, I get the error message “the essential package ‘ubuntu-minimal’ could not be located”. Searching, I found this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/1825938

It looks like they were going from cosmic (18) to disco (19), but it was pretty spot on. I found all the lines in sources.list commented out, and some were pointing to xenial while others were pointed to bionic. I followed Vivien Milat (d-ubnntu-t) 's lead by un-commenting all the lines, and setting all the references to bionic. Upgrade won’t complete however and indicates that some of the packages may be broken.

Any thoughts/ideas on what I should do from here? It looks like I should setup another droplet, do a clean install of 20, then move things over. But I’m not sure how to even start with that. If I had my choice, I’d like to find a way of getting this upgrade to work as it seems simpler, but I really don’t have any clue if it would be or not.