Marek Novotny
On 2017-04-12, Steve Carroll <"Steve Carroll"@noSPAM.none>wrote:

Steve Carroll
On 2017-04-11, Steve Carroll <fretwizzer@gmail.com>wrote:

On Tuesday, April 11, 2017 at 3:50:46 PM UTC-6, Marek Novotny wrote:

Marek Novotny
// snip

Maybe a quick video on dd so you can see it in action. I had bought a dell cheapo laptop once and it had a restore partition on it. I wanted to install another os clean but I wanted to backup that restore partition. I used dd for that. I also wrote the restore partition to a thumb drive.

Steve Carroll
LOL! Dude, you're killing me here ;) You *don't* have to do that on my account. I didn't have crap in there and, realistically, I'll probably always store my important data (web related projects) elsewhere, as well. That said, if what you're talking about can just replace the whole kit 'n caboodle in one fell swoop (mainly so I don't have to reconfigure stuff), I'd definitely appreciate knowing how to do that.

Marek Novotny
For now, what you can do is just grab your home directory if you like. As time goes forward you'll start to identify your conf files and then you can use tar to make a backup of them and anything else you like. I always do a clean install, but then use my tar backup to get all my stuff back.

Steve Carroll
If I do end up having to reinstall that's a better idea anyway. I had that initial issue awhile back, that I wasn't sure how I got out of, and every now and then I'd get a weird error message. Maybe this is related to that and my having neglected to deal with it? Whatever... I didn't pay anything for Linux and the install goes *really* quickly so its all good... it's the configuration that took the bulk of the time. I read there can be GRUB issues when you load Windows on *after* having loaded Linux, not necessarily the other way around... though, I'm not sure what Windows updates would do (which I haven't done so it's a moot point here). I booted into Win10 to see if it was still working... it looks too much like a friggin' website ;)

Update: I got it working and, like last time, I have *no* idea why ;)

I put it aside for a few hours to go do a few things and after dinner I went back and ran fsck, the dpkg fix again and it came back up in a lower resolution. I was reading and it seems this might be related to the graphics card driver. Anyway, when I restarted again it came up with the higher resolution. I then took a chance to see if update would go through all its steps and it did. Everything seems to be working fine again. I'm glad I did some reading and decided to keep at it a bit instead of reinstalling. That you know of, is there a system check I can do that will tell me if there are any known issues?

Marek Novotny
You can look at dmesg and get an idea for what's been going on.

$ sudo dmesg