Unable to Upgrade Ubuntu

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte

When attempting to update Ubuntu from version 14.04 LTS to 16.04 using the command do-release-upgrade you may encounter the following error:

This error is caused by non utf-8 characters in the /var/lib/dpkg/status file. Follow the instructions below to identify and remove these characters.

1. grep -avx '.*' /var/lib/dpkg/status

   This will display any not utf-8 characters in the file

   

2. sudo nano /var/lib/dpkg/status
3. Locate the bad characters and delete them
4. Save the file

/boot is out of space

1. dpkg -l | grep linux-image

   This will display all the kernels currently installed. All but the most recent can be safely deleted.

2. apt-get remove old-linux-kernel-package-name

   ex: apt-get remove linux-image-3.13.0-32-generic