Hi all,

I’m having a bad day and did something colossally stupid, deleting everything from /boot/.

The system is still running. What do you think my best course of action is?

My current idea is to create a timeshift backup, reinstall debian from USB, then restore from backup in timeshift

If this won’t work or you have a better idea I would really appreciate your advice.

Thanks in advance

  • masterofn001English
    1•4 months ago

    I’ve only ever used grub with bios/mbr or a BIOS/gpt (with grub bios partition).

    No clue about efi/uefi.

    This is the simplest method I can think of.

    The arch wiki, however, is, as always, a great source of info:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB

    **Linux is amazing in it’s ability to keep working even when you accidentally all the things.

    I once sudo apt removed mint-x-icons or something which, for whatever reason, also needed to remove cinnamon. As in cinnamon the entire DE.

    I realised what I had done as I watched the terminal.
    #%&@! panic.
    …
    reinstalled.
    joy.

    • @dis_honestfamiliarEnglish
      5•4 months ago

      Linux is amazing in it’s ability to keep working even when you accidentally all the things.

      Annoyingly so. I once made a backup. Then to confirm it would restore the system, I deleted everything on root path. as in /

      It did as told.

      OK let’s reboot and verify system.

      Sudo reboot

      Command not found

      sudo shutdown

      Command not found

      But it sat there with a blinking cursor on the terminal

      • @PloppEnglish
        5•4 months ago

        Then to confirm it would restore the system, I deleted everything on root path. as in /

        I’m a noob, so forgive me if I’m being very ignorant here, but how on earth could that be a good idea? It sounds like “in order to see if I’ve installed these airbags correctly I shall now crash head first into this concrete bridge foundation at max speed”?

        • @[email protected]English
          4•4 months ago

          I’m assuming it’s a fresh install, so nothing of value was lost if the restore failed. But also I’ve heard attempting to delete things in /sys and /dev can brick your computer. So it’s not a great idea.

        • @dis_honestfamiliarEnglish
          1•4 months ago

          I’m not so sure your analogy works. Unless you are testing to see how fast you can bring a new test dummy into production. Or you are testing to see how fast you can install new airbags with blemishes and all.

          It gave me a reason to finally run the command that <insert something amazing here> by recursively deleting everything.

          • @PloppEnglish
            1•4 months ago

            It sounded like you were testing the (one and only) backup in a live environment is all.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•4 months ago

        Not to victim blame but you did put in --no-preserve-root. You had to read those instructions.😄