What a day

[D-Dan]

I’ve put this in Linux talk, but honestly, it could go in almost any PC thread.

I decided to give DaVinci Resolve (free version) a look today. Now, I’m not saying that it was the cause of my woes, but it’s the last thing I did.

Anyhoo, I had some graphical glitches after playing with it, so went for a normal reboot. This is when it got hairy. The shutdown process got hung up on unmounting just about every device, and whilst it usually has a time limit, these were all unlimited. Eventually, I went for the hard reboot option.

This was a non-starter (literally). Boot device mounted, but /sbin/init did not exist, and stopped with the very helpful message “You’re on your own”.

Now, I didn’t want to re-install (this is Linux, after all, not Windows), and after an hour, I noticed that various system directories were missing, /bin, /lib, /lib64 and /sbin (by now, I’d booted to a live Mint CD to try and fix). This explained the boot error, and why I couldn’t chroot to fix from within. I needed a new solution to repair outside the system.

Turns out, the crash would bomb out at a minimal terminal (depending on progress of repair, I could also cause a kernel panic which left me with nothing).

After several tries, and reference to my laptop (which also runs Arch Linux, and which was thankfully still working) I re-made the symlinks to directories in /usr, and voila, here I am.

Now, three hours of Saturday gone, but no reinstall needed. Do that with Winblows 🙂

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Dave Rice]

I haven’t seen Windows do a total balls up like that for years, I’m sure it happens at your work though ?

These days with W10 a reset will do the trick without losing any data or users if a system restore is out of the question. If you need to do a reinstall, which with a modern CPU and SSD takes about 10 minutes, if it detects an existing installation it will put this into a directory called windows.old so you can extract the data.

Windows 10 really has become very reliable, with the odd maddening glitch like the recent networking issues.

[Tippon]

D-Dan wrote:

Now, three hours of Saturday gone, but no reinstall needed. Do that with Winblows

Why? 😉

[D-Dan]

@ricedg I haven’t seen it with Windows or Linux for a long long time, but a completely non-booting system on Linux is still fixable. never found a way to repair Windows outside of the OS.

@tippon Why what?

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Dave Rice]

A Linux technique you use doesn’t work in Windows doesn’t mean it isn’t fixable. Linux doesn’t have a System Restore baked into the o/s but so long as it gets fixed ?

TBH my preferred method is a periodical (monthly) bare metal (system) backup with a daily data (incremental) backup. I keep 4 of the monthly backups and 14 of the daily. If I make some spectacular changes I can always do a system backup on demand.

I use EaseUs ToDo Home and have tested the restores in anger, indeed I’ve used the system backup and restore when a disk clone didn’t work. It’s been a while since I relied on a Linux desktop but remember I used Back In Time and it did the job just fine.

I can see why you’re rightly proud of what you did but these days I couldn’t be ar$ed, I need it simples ?

[keith with the teef]

Good work. Way over my head though. 3 hours on a Saturday lost. You did well. I would of had a temper tantrum and trashed my kit.

I do wish windows would allow you to make a custom desk top. I hate w10.

[Richard]

Sometimes the gods of bad fortune are out to get you. Freeview needed yet another damned retune, so I did two out of the three boxes yesterday with no troubles, armed with such success I tried to do the third box this morning. Oh what fun. It decided that we were in a different reception area so set things to select transmissions that we could not receive… Several ‘easy retunes’ failed to convince it of its error and a slash and burn retune was the only answer, but that one lost all of the recording schedules.

The OS is most definitely not Windows, though I am not going out on a limb to guess which it is.

[keith with the teef]

@Richard. Sometimes the gods of bad fortune are out to get you. Very true funny that!! 🙂

[Ed P]

I learned my lesson long ago. I take a full VM copy of my OS disk (I separate programs and data) and use that VM as a first pass on any major bleeding edge changes. (I still use a Windows VM for Insider Builds, but  last year I have learned a lesson that I also need to ‘dummy-in’ a data drive as well as one stupid windows update destroyed data directory links. (not quite as bad as it sounds, but close).

Use Stardock’s Object Desktop Keith and you can customize to your heart’s content.

[D-Dan]

Well, fortunately, my /home directory is on its’ own drive, and I have media softlinked to that (music, videos and pictures) from another drive again. If I was forced to reinstall, I wouldn’t lose any of that. However, running Arch, which is a minimal installation initially, I’d have a lot of work getting everything back up and running.

I do keep a backup, but it is rather out of date, and this was a timely reminder to create a new one.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Tippon]

@D-Dan I was just teasing about taking that much time to avoid a reinstall. Nothing serious, ignore me ?

[wasbit]

keith with the teef wrote:

I do wish windows would allow you to make a custom desk top. I hate w10.

Classic Shell (I use it on W8.1) was renamed Classic Start & has been superseded by Open Shell
– https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Back in 2010 I used Bumptop for a while and quite liked it. Then Google brought the company and it disapeared. Oh well.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Here is a link to Windows shell replacements and what happend to them ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows

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