He'p me....

Everything running along ok with 14.04 installed on old thinkpad. OpenCpn locked up and we had an ungraceful exit from Nx On reboot, noticed a number of failures during load. Screen moving too fast to read which ones. Loads to blank screen, suspect xserver along with whatever else is not loading. Get intermittent blink from hdd light, looks like things are running in the background, but no visuals.

Arrived Oriental NC last night, so dragged Dell laptop up the hill to The Bean to plug in (no 12v for the Dell) and remind myself how to boot the Thinkpad off the Nx stick.

Question is, best method to restore the system without overwriting current files in /home. Bare bones install no extras added.

Town has a 48 hr limit on the town dock, so hoping for a quick suggestion or 2. Will check back in a couple of hours in hopes of some enlightenment.

Guess I need to overnight a 12v adapter for this box. It's a power sucker, but has been reliable. At least then I would have a spare that will run onboard. Always something fun happening eh?

TIA
Cap' Couillon

If you want to skip all the fun things you can try, this would be a suggestion;

Boot from a stick.

Find, or create, a new partition on either an external or internal device that is large enough for all the data in your current /home directory. Having enough space on an external device makes the process simplier. If you have data (charts, mp3, videos) backed up elsewhere, obviously it can be smaller as this is a rescue.

For example, a 40GB harddrive all in one partition (two with a swap partition) 25GBs are used.

Repartition 26GBs to one partition, and the remainder to *new* partition, if you have a large swap you can sacrifice it.

When you have a *new* partition, assure it's mounted. then, sudo mount /dev/sda3-4-7"WHATEVER" /media/snafu to mount it to the directory you've just created.

Using the filemanager or the commandline move the data from your /home (actually /media/"whatever_the_long_UUID_number_is"/home/) to the new partition/other device (/media/snafu, or name/location of external device.

The point is to have, or create, a space that will accommodate the amount of data you have in your /home directory. It doesn't matter how, or where. It just needs to be done.

Using the example, allocate 10GB to /root and 16GB to /home, re-install the system, adding your newly created partition mounted and named (/snafu, e.g.) so when you boot the fresh installation the partition/file structure is automagially recognised.

Move as much data 'back' to the newly created /home partition. Resize the partitions as required.

When all the data is 'returned' to /home, reduce the lifeboat partition to a swap size and format and sail on.

Tks Moe.... Did pretty much just that yesterday afternoon with success....

Decided to wait here an extra day for a 12v power supply for the dell Belt and suspenders as it were. Besides it's a cute little town and lord knows I have enough maint to catch up on to spend a layday without worrying about it. No reason to worry anyway progress south may be slow, but it's south.

Tks for the tips

(The Other) David