update-manager -d tar: /etc/apt/preferences: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

Could not determine the upgrade

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:
E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

 This can be caused by:
 * Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
 * Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
 * Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

If none of this applies, then please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report.

Thanks for your bugreport.

I fixed the error, there is another issue in the log, but I'm sure that is a transient failure from a kernel update being in progress.

Could you please re-try the upgrade tomorrow to verify the fix?

Thanks,
 Michael

This bug was fixed in the package update-manager - 1:0.134.4

---------------
update-manager (1:0.134.4) lucid; urgency=low

  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgrade.cfg, DistUpgrade/DistUpgrade.cfg.hardy:
    - do not enable apport anymore
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:
    - set empty dialog titles for error/information dialogs (it looks
      like glade removed those for some reason from the .ui file)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeAufs.py:
    - fix crash if aufs (--sandbox mode) is used (LP: #562394)
  * DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeMain.py:
    - fix generation of system state file for non-existing dirs/files
      (LP: #561872)
  * UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py:
    - provide a LIST_TOGGLE_CHECKED column as a workaround for orca
      that does not work with values updated via
      column_install.set_cell_data_func (LP: #561563)
  * update-manager:
    - use gettext.install(unicode=True) to avoid breaking with
      optparse and ja.po (LP: #557804)
 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:54:47 +0200