Unfortunately I failed to learn the lesson until about the fourth time of losing everything!     Thanks to VastOne for this "great recovery tool" as you guys are calling it, or, as I like to refer to it, my "GoTo" or the best OS I've ever personally ran!  Since at least the summer of 2012 I'd say.  This is by far the longest period of time running the same OS!  And, most of the time, now, I just plug in the 4Tb hdd and pick and choose which .fsa file to restore!  I do one every few days now unless I'm doing something special and I've been know to create an .fsa file every hour or so.  My OS, (VSIDO) is actually loaded with tools I don't even know are there! 

However, that said, word has it that I know the owner!!!  So not only has VSIDO the OS personally saved my data life, the guy that created it has step by stepped me through untold and countless errors or breakages of my own design as well!  And the community still here is a pretty impressive FEATURE not mentioned often enough 'cough cough' PackRat and company!

Long live fsarchiver!

Quote from: PackRat on May 31, 2019, 11:56:58 PM

@jed - you still have snow in the shady areas?

Not for a couple of weeks now!!!  I would have already been moved in with you down there had there still been snow.    Our first 70F day finally came May 28th I believe.  Haven't had one since of course... 

  So @PackRat, there have been 4 more +70 (by a degree or two ususally) days since last I posted.  The most terrible and unfortunate news is that while walking the lake property across from the State Park  (we live on the opposite shore of the park), there is indeed still snow in the deep woods. It is not much and will be gone by this weekend I'd think.  I've talked to several other "Maine Guide/Game Warden" friends who all say this is the latest they've seen it on the ground, even in the 'big woods'! 

Still pretty miserably cold up here in the 'nether' regions of Maine.  Most everyone lost their outdoor plants last night. 

Still holding fast to my VSIDO though!  This scrot is from the goto (MSI).  The stinkpad is also still driving VSIDO, and has been up exactly 82 days 12 hrs.

By the way PackRat, beautiful scrot!  I'd love to have the pic of the wallpaper...   

Borked it trying to install nvidia drivers (the more things change, the more the stay the same), issue with the initramfs-tools again. System still booted and ran, but I hate that error message during upgrades so did a new clean install. Will stick with nouveau since I won't be gaming on this computer.

Hey PackRat, had the same issues with Nvidia myself for the last week.  Anyway, finally got it to install and work properly.  I had to blacklist nouveau right from grub.  I think part of my issue was using my own compiled kernel.  On the new install getting rid of the nouveau driver worked for me.  I have, dare I say, newish hardware, a GTX 980M.  There are a lot of commands you can use after the .run file such as --path-to-kernel that totally broke my system a couple of times.

The uEFI live boot went perfectly.  I did not even have to go into bios to get it to see the liveUSB! Straight to grub it went!  Default booted to the first selection, no problems or errors seen during the boot, ran (C)ceni, then installed.  (I was a little disappointed to not see 'efibootmgr' installed on the live media.)  Speaking as a mobile VSIDO user (2 laptops) it is nice to see some sort of indicator that your wireless is connected.  Is wicd still maintained?  Or is there another way to see at a glance if the connection is alive while in the fluxbox GUI?

Setup a '/' a '/home' and a '/boot/efi' from the installer. 2 out of those three partitions already existed.  The '/' I created using the installers disk tools, chose a current and already existing/used/goto '/home' and a currently existing and working '/boot/efi'.  So the disk tools (manual Geeks Paradise? choice in the installer) worked fine for me.  I never opened Gparted, before or after the install.  Got the long pause during the bootloader install which I expected, it completed (i did not see errors because i used the menu selection to install) and i rebooted.

On reboot the regular boot occured without seeing the newly installed VSIDO as I knew it would not.  Logged into my regular goto, update-grub, reboot, voila, it is now in the grub menu of course, into the new install, everything is beautiful not to steal song lyrics or anything.  So nice to leave chroot in the dust!  --BIND this!

I notice on reboot that the first time I run a root task as my user in terminal, I still have to use the vsido live password.  After I've used vsido as the pw, mine then works after that as well as roots.  Just thought it weird enough to mention.  I do a passwd change on both after the install anyway.  All of this brought to you on real metal, a MSI Laptop.

Just a cut/paste really, of what is installed and what is not during the vsido-welcome...


cups cups-pdf system-config-printer printer-driver-hpijs ;  installed from vsido-welcome

openjdk-6-jre icedtea6-plugin ; does not install (i think java is up to 8? and icedtea6 is also a higher ver now)

libreoffice libreoffice-gtk ; should be libreoffice-gtk2 now or libreoffice-gnome?  IMO your better off removing this option.  Easily installs from apt-get.

git git-gui git-cvs git-svn git-email mercurial subversion subversion-tools bzr bzrtools cvs thunar-vcs-plugin geany version control tools ; installed from vsido-welcome

openssh-server ; installed from vsido-welcome

apache2 mysql-server php5 php-pear php5-gd php5-mysql php5-imagick php5-curl curl phpmyadmin rsync cronolog ; none of the LAMP stack part installs
E: Package 'php5' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-gd' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-mysql' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-imagick' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'php5-curl' has no installation candidate
and so on etc...

build-essential debhelper cdbs dh-make diffutils patch gnupg fakeroot lintian devscripts dpatch dput quilt zenity clipit bashburn keepassx numlockx ; installed from vsido-welcome

gimp inkscape mtpaint shotwell darktable rawtherapee ; gimp does not install because gcolor2 is not available. remove it and the rest will install just fine.

break time...

   I will try to post later with some updated info.  Not any fixes per se, but perhaps enough info that someone smarter than me can interpret.  Give me a couple of hours and I'll try to have it all posted...   

Also, I am currently booted into a liveUSB session that is curently 'pretending' to be my goto lappy.   I am booted up on metal using the 20Mar2019 ISO image.  Default boot no changes to grub cmd line.  So far a seemingly error free boot, and now at aprx. 17 hours of uptime, pretty confident in the 'state' of the machine.

I'll check back here for info, advice, or cake.