Sorry to reply to my own message (again). I took a closer look at the logs and realized that the partitioner errors aren't what kept the daemon to stop; those errors are in the logs even before I upgraded. This one seems to be the culprit.
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.commons.daemon.support.DaemonLoader.load(DaemonLoader.java:160) Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.cassandra.config.ConfigurationException: SimpleStrategy requires a replication_factor strategy option. at org.apache.cassandra.db.Table.<init>(Table.java:275) at org.apache.cassandra.db.Table.open(Table.java:114) at org.apache.cassandra.db.Table.open(Table.java:97) at org.apache.cassandra.service.AbstractCassandraDaemon.setup(AbstractCassandraDaemon.java:204) at org.apache.cassandra.service.AbstractCassandraDaemon.init(AbstractCassandraDaemon.java:254) ... 5 more Caused by: org.apache.cassandra.config.ConfigurationException: SimpleStrategy requires a replication_factor strategy option. at org.apache.cassandra.locator.SimpleStrategy.validateOptions(SimpleStrategy.java:71) at org.apache.cassandra.locator.AbstractReplicationStrategy.createReplicationStrategy(AbstractReplicationStrategy.java:218) at org.apache.cassandra.db.Table.createReplicationStrategy(Table.java:295) at org.apache.cassandra.db.Table.<init>(Table.java:271) ... 9 more Cannot load daemon I'm not sure how to check the replication_factor and/or update it without using cassandra-cli, which requires the daemon to be running. Casey