Drush not updating Drupal core I've been wrestling with this since yesterday and have reinstalled drush 3 times, rebooted, restarted mysql(mariaDB) and a few other things but nothing works. I'm trying to update my core from 7.14 to 7.32 and really want to do it with drush instead of manually. The only thing I think might be causing this is that I am on Debian and my sites directory is a symlink from /usr/share/drupal/sites to /etc/drupal/7/sites or that I have drush installed for root only(composer and drush files in /root)

When I try and update the core with:

drush up drupal

I get back:

Update information last refreshed: Fri, 10/24/2014 - 15:01

Name    Installed Version  Proposed version  Message

drupal  Unknown            Unknown           Specified project not found

No code updates available.

Tried clearing my drush cache to no avail and when I check for releases with drush rl it manages to successfully lists the 7.32:

Project  Release  Date         Status

drupal   7.x-dev  2014-Oct-19  Development

drupal   7.32     2014-Oct-15  Supported, Recommended, Security

I maintain a few Drupal sites with drush and have never had this problem before but this is my only server with Debian so maybe that has something to do with it. I've read a lot of the threads about issues resembling this going back all the way to 2011 but nothing seems to fix my issue.

If anyone can help then thanks and if not I guess I'll have to manually upgrade the core.
Try drush pm-refresh, and then run drush pm-updatecode again.