11 mo. ago • 94%

Just moved to Linux: a follow up

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.

45 comments

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

Just wait until you learn the powers of chroot :)

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- 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
  
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- This is the way
  
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One of us, one of us. I did the same only 2-3 hours into my first ever Linux install.

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- I feel your pain :P
  I'm almost done getting everything back, I think!
  
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  How long until you start doing backups? 😂
  
  Edit: Took me some years btw
  
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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.

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Timeshift for backups is a godsend in these situations

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- OP should just know that TimeShift doesn’t work on Fedora Workstation without some tinkering.
  
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  Thats good to know because Fedora seems to be where im heading when i make the switch as well.
  
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borked my bootloader and had to do a fresh install

That's where you're wrong :)

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- You're right. I spent a few hours trying to fix it before giving up and determined that reinstalling would be quicker lol
  
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  Before you can fix a bootloader, you first need to learn how to install and set up a bootloader. I think most people learn that part when they try Arch
  
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Congratulations soldier! You're one of us now.

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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.

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- I think you may need help.... I bid you good luck on your recovery :P
  
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When you get more advanced you can use a distro like System Rescue to fix your bootloader instead of having to reinstall everything

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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.

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- 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
  
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- 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!
  
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  This comment isn't making any sense to me, but good on ya?
  
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- Also, once your install is in a state you like, create a backup with CloneZilla.
  
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  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.
  
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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.

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- Time heals all wounds :P
  
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I'm on fedora silverblue and that won't ever happen again to me

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- Still possible to break your bootloader.
  
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One of us! One of us!

Although I think having to fix a borked bootloader is a good bit of experience, it's probably not something you are always going to want to spend time on. I have used boot-repair only once, but it was like magic. Just throwing it out there for your future use and a general recommendation. :)

https://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair/home/Home/

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- Thank you for the offer. I hope I never need to take advantage of it lol
  
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If you keep around a bootable rescue stick like System Rescue it has a boot menu entry that will boot the Linux installed on your machine. Once you do that you can run a command or two to reinstall the bootloader. You can search the net or whatever at leisure since it will work fully.

Alternatively, if your system Linux is borked harder, you can boot the rescue Linux and use more advanced methods, depending on what's wrong. The rescue Linux also has a graphical environment with browser if you need it.

At the very least sometimes you can figure out what went wrong. It may not be much comfort if you lost your system but at least you learn what not to do in the future. Too many people just say "oh, it just broke" and leave it at that.

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- I think I know what the issue was... I modified the grub.cfg file and ran grub2-mkconfig and I think it was saying it detected a Linux install at my root partition, but didn't seem to recognize my /boot or /boot/efi partitions and I couldn't figure out how to edit that via the grub cli. If that wasn't the case, then that's okay. I'll make sure to teach myself a bit more about the bootloader before trying to edit it again
  
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Keeping /home separate is a good call. I can also recommend backups to a different system. Also test those backups.

Playing with things can be fun if that is what you enjoy. Being careful is good but the best way to avoid serious issues is being able to recover from the worst case.

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- Why do you advocate for keeping /home separate?
  
  I personally don't do it because the more partitions you have, the more often you need to fiddle around in GParted when one partition gets full. This is also why I use swap files instead of swap partitions
  
  As far as I can tell, unless you distro-hop, separating /home doesn't have any advantages. Even then, sharing one /home directory between multiple desktop environments can cause some problems
  
  I agree with making and testing backups, though. My current strategy is to back everything up to a 4.2 TiB ZFS pool with daily snapshots on my LAN, and back up the most important data on that to the cloud
  
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  Not the person above, but if it is an issue you ever run into you are doing it "wrong". Not really, but let me explain.
  
  Having it on a separate partition has a few advantages like different mount flags (e.g. noexec), easier backup management (especially snapshots) and some other benefits like using your home for a new installation (like OP wants to) or it prevents some critical failures in case you accidentally fill it up (e.g. partial writes or services cannot start).
  
  I often cannot decide on specific mount sizes either, because requirements may change depending on what you do. Hence I would just stick with some reasonable defaults for the installation and use some form of volume manager instead. If you want to use ext4, xfs etc I would recommend using LVM as it gives you a lot of freedom (resizing of volumes, snapshots and adding additional drives, mixed RAID modes etc) or there are btrfs, zfs or bcachefs to name the most common file systems which implement their own idea of storage pools and volumes.
  
  Never should you need to resize a partition, there are more modern approaches. Create a single partition (+ a small EFI partition somewhere) and never bother with partitions ever again. The (performance) overhead is negligible and it gives so many additional benefits I didn't even mention. Your complaint is a solved problem.
  
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  I don't think it is critical to keep /home separate but if you need to reinstall it is really nice. You can reset the OS without touching your data or user-level configs. Either for the same distro because you fiddled around and broke it or another one for distro-hopping. It also makes encrypting it easy, although full-disk encryption is getting so easy that it probably isn't an issue. Good backups also mitigate this, although the recovery will be slower than just reinstalling while leaving your existing home there.
  
  To be honest I don't actually keep home separate anymore. But that is mostly because I trust NixOS enough that I know I will never need to reinstall. I can always roll back or worst case install over top of the existing install from a live USB.
  
  Overall I would say that the cost of doing so is fairly small as well. Unless you are running a lot of system services data outside of /home is usually fairly limited. Although I agree that getting the partition sizes wrong can be frustrating.
  
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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.

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Sweet, welcome! :) I know the feeling. I just finished reinstalling Nobara after being dumb and goofing up patching. Then I tried to fix it and made the system totally unusable and I gave up.

A while ago I jacked my grub config and decided to try to fix it manually. I managed to stumble through it and learned some stuff, though I am still fuzzy on some details.

I mostly want to just use the computer without a lot of headache and both Mint and Nobara have been great for coding (various), electronics design, 3d modeling and printing, graphics, photo editing, and such.

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- This is why I gave up on fixing it yesterday lol. I spent a few days setting it up, I didn't wanna spend a few more days to try to figure out exactly what the issue was when I could just give in and then actually use it
  
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  Totally valid! Theoretically with more experience it may be easier / faster to fix but...idk
  
  See this is why I keep /home on a separate partition (or drive in some cases). I can reinstall or switch distros anytime without worrying about all my files (they're backed up, anyway but doing a restore is a pita).
  
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Pro tip:

Create a separate partition for /home. Then it's all still there if need to do a fresh install.

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