Migration from R4.2 to R4.3 didn't go as planned

1n40 · January 19, 2026, 5:19pm

Hi everyone,
after a few hours of not being able to migrate, I have to ask - did anyone encounter following issues during in-place upgrade from R4.2 to R4.3? By the way, I know you’d most likely want to kill me for the photos of screen, I was so angry I didn’t spend the time with connecting USB device to dom0, sorry about that.
I’m using qubes-dist-upgrade utility.
When following command is used, error happens during distro-sync (command qubes-dist-upgrade --releasever=4.3 --all-pre-reboot -y):

At this point, even qubes-dom0-update isn’t possible.

However, here is uname and os-release info:

Any ideas on how to continue from this point? I tried to use stage 4 of the qubes-dist-upgrade, however it looks like this utility doesn’t recognize dom0 as upgraded to R4.3

QioFan · January 23, 2026, 3:02pm

Do you know what stage (of the 3 stages in pre-boot) qubes-dist-upgrade got to before the error?

1n40 · January 29, 2026, 6:57pm

Hi everyone,
long time no see. It took some time, but today I did figure out what to do about this error, and it was solution that most likely wasn’t expected.
For hte Grub2, I was able to manually install fc41 versions by searching for RPMs.
ALL OF THE COMMANDS ARE BEING EXECUTED AS ROOT

dnf remove breeze-icon-theme

with this, I was able to actually execute stage 3

qubes-dist-upgrade --releasever=4.3 -y -s

More than 1600 packages were upgraded/downloaded
But, after the upgrade, sys-net, sys-firewall and sys-whonix didn’t start. To fix this, I used commands from

These were the commands I executed:

journalctl --vacuum-time=1d
lvresize --size 40G /dev/qubes_dom0/root
resize2fs /dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root
lvconvert --repair qubes_dom0/vm-pool

With this done, all previously mentioned qubes did start again.
Then, I executed another part of migration

qubes-dist-upgrade --releasever=4.3 -y --all-post-reboot

For stage 4, every single migration attempt is failing. This bug is reported

github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues

Root access fails on debian-12-minimal templates created in r4.2 and restored in r4.3, causing qubes-dist-upgrade error

opened 02:48PM - 17 Jan 26 UTC

parulin

C: Debian/Ubuntu P: default needs diagnosis C: dist upgrade affects-4.3

**Note:** this bug report comes from [ephile on the forum](https://forum.qubes-o…s.org/t/root-access-fails-on-templates-causing-qubes-dist-upgrade-error/38695/5) but I can reproduce. ## Qubes OS version: r4.3 ## Affected component(s) or functionality: For debian-12-minimal templates restored from r4.2.x or 4.1.x: qvm-run -u root debian-12-minimal xterm opens the terminal as user, not root, and qubes-dist-upgrade fails with the following error message: ``` ----> Upgrading debian-12-minimal... ERROR: This script must be run with root permissions + 1000 -ne 0 + echo 'ERROR: This script must be run with root permissions' + exit 1 ERROR: A general error occurred while upgrading debian-12-minimal (exit code 1). ``` ## Steps to reproduce the behavior: Migrate debian-12-minimal template from a r4.2.4 machine to r4.3. Once restored, run ``` sudo qubes-dist-upgrade --releasever=4.3 --template-standalone-upgrade ``` ## Expected or desired behavior: All supported templates migrated from any r4.x should maintain root terminal access and be upgradeable with qubes-dist-upgrade. ## Actual behavior: The upgrade process fails and attempts to access the root terminal open the user terminal instead. qvm-console-dispvm --autostart debian-12-minimal works as expected, so root access is available via this method. ## General notes: debian-12-minimal templates installed to r4.3 with qvm-templates behave as expected.

And with that, I was able to boot into R4.3 with 6.18 kernel