I recently made a post discussing my move to Linux on Fedora, and it’s been going great. But today I think I have now become truly part of this community. I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install. Learned my lesson with modifying the bootloader without first doing thorough investigation lol.
Fortunately I kept my /home on its own partition, so this shouldn’t be too bad to get back up and running as desired.

  • jwt@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    I ran a command that borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install.

    Just wait until you learn the powers of chroot :)

    • aoidenpa@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Few days ago I downgraded glibc(I’m dumdum) because it was recommended in a reddit thread for a problem I was having. I couldn’t even chroot. Fortunately I could update with pacman --root

    • Corr@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      I feel your pain :P
      I’m almost done getting everything back, I think!

  • catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Borked your bootloader already? You’re a true Linux user lol. You’ll eventually learn to not do that (and back up regularly).

    Good choice with Fedora! I love dnf and the choices Fedora makes overall.

  • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install

    That’s where you’re wrong :)

    • Corr@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      You’re right. I spent a few hours trying to fix it before giving up and determined that reinstalling would be quicker lol

  • bulwark@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I’ve messed up my system so many times over the years that now I think I secretly get excited when it accidentally happens. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I actually enjoy trying to understand what went wrong. A USB stick with a light weight Linux distro and chroot you can usually get back in there and look around at the damage.

    • Corr@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      I think you may need help… I bid you good luck on your recovery :P

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Friendo, I think once you understand exactly what an OS is, you’ll have fewer problems. An OS is just a layer on top of hardware with a lot of scripts and tools that enable that hardware to do things like move files, show graphics, and send audio in a desktop environment. Never issue a root or sudo command unless you understand exactly what it’s doing. Following this one simple rule will save you a lot of trouble, same as any Windows machine.

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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      11 months ago

      And a lot of configuration, or so I thought? I’m investing heavily but I’m scared for my investments :-)

      Another Linux noob here, after a couple of Linux servers (Tenfingers, Lemmy) switched over (finally) my main PC, or well kids got the gaming machine and I’m on a Mint ThinkPad now :-) and a backup think centre tiny if the Lemmy server bails out.

      I have this little windows box to print stuff (I didn’t know I hated printers) and every time I use it I’m so happy I don’t need windows in my personal life anymore…

      Cheers and welcome OP!

        • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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          11 months ago

          Except that I’m jumping ship to Linux fully, I’m thinking a lot about hardware failure, not the data but say the mobo, so maybe that’s curious. Seemed you were knowledgeable about those things, or I’m explaining very badly.

          Cheers

    • Corr@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      This is reasonably valid. I think Windows makes it a bit harder to do real damage to your system, so I’m used to that. I also have borked installs in VMs before, but that’s never mattered because spinning up a new one takes no time. Definitely a valuable lesson to do more research before running commands, especially as sudo

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Nah. This is old school thought. Use an immutable distro if this is your concern, and keep all your files on a NAS, or something else that can replay your files. Local images of your entire filesystem isn’t needed anymore.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            They are two different things.

            A Clone of an OS install is not needed anymore, for a jillion reasons.

            Personal files do not relate to that.

            Perhaps you don’t understand how these are intended to work?

              • deepdive@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Heyha ! Read about dd on makeuseof after reading your post, to see how it works.

                Restoring from an image seems exactly what I was looking for as a full backup restore.

                However this kind of 1 command backup isn’t going to work on databases (mariadb, mysql…). How should I procede with my home directory where all my containers live and most of them having running databases?

                Does it work with logical volumes? Is it possible to copy evrything except /home of the logical volumes?

  • LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol
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    11 months ago

    When you get more advanced you can use a distro like System Rescue to fix your bootloader instead of having to reinstall everything

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    11 months ago

    In my first few weeks of linux I screwed up mounting a hard drive and my pc wouldn’t boot past grub. 4x different times I tried and each time I broke it. Then a year later I revisted mounting the drive and it went smoothly.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Trial-and-error is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

    t. Had to reinstall GNU/Linux several times through the course of months while trying new stuff and/or trying to improve the current ones.