Sorry for the late response; busy times... On Sat, Aug 05, 2017 at 06:04:10AM -0500, o1bigtenor wrote: > > > By 'borked' I meant that I had an unusable system. I cannot remember > exactly as > that was over 3 years ago just that the system was halted and I couldn't > get into > it - - - nothing. So it was a reinstall. That was what lead to my starting > to use > VMs - - - that level of aggravation and frustration just was too much to > risk a > repeat. From that I also developed the habit of having all the VMs stored > in a > certain fashion, which, on this last system upgrade, Vbox will no longer > let me > do - - - rather it has been deciding where to put stuff. So I've started > looking into > LXC and LXD - - - still a total noob though! > > Oh, OK. two comments here. First, using VMs and jailed (LXC) processes is the way to go there to maintain system integrity when testing. As a general rule, be able to bring your system from the ashes when doing testing; this is a rather long discussion and largely depends on the user's ability and methods of choice. And second, with all due respect, it is the "noob way," as you put it, to reinstall a system because of such a failure. GRUB and LILO (I use both equally well) will let you go and but your system with a prompt following the "init" process 9a single shell). Then, you can fix it as you please. A more general system recovery (I do this all the time) would be to do one of two things: (a) recover an old backup of your system placed in a tarball (I do that), and (b) recover from an image of the drive/partition that was obtained with "dd" In (a), you may need to go and modify the boot sector if you are using LILO. With GRUB, it should boot from the loader of GRUB as usual and it will find the kernel from the grug.conf (or whatever that file is). GRUB is really king. In b, you need to do nothing other than boot and drop the image to the partition with dd. Yes, you an do this to a mounted file-system. As to be helpful in this post, I recommend that you attempt to do a system recovery using both methods. It is a few hours worth of work with time well spent that will save you from re-installs. Let's face it, we have Linux because we do not want to deal with OSs like Windows -which require re-installs-- and we cannot act like Windows users... VirtualBox is great, but it is a very intrusive piece of software to install (requires a kernel module) and you can exploit most of its benefits with LXC. I still use VirtualBox.