I am running 12.1 on Acer 5536, an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit machine with ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card.
A couple of weeks back the network manager quick-start button from the top right corner of the desktop became invisible. The machine would still connect to the router without any issues. Last week, I tried to connect it to a different wifi network and it did not. Finally, I had to force it to do that as a superuser through Yast. I tried to restore the network manager on the desktop using Panel. However, Panel would not open. It was then that I decided, like a fool, to reinstall Panel. Using Yast, I unchecked the Panel in the repositories and clicked on update. The system (clearly smarter than me), asked me to reconfirm the action. I did that without thinking much.
The proverbial crock of excreta hit6 the fan when I tried to reboot. It would give me a message reading ‘failed to load session “gnome-fallback”’. That dialog box would offer me only one option - LOG OUT. Then, I re-logged in as Failsafe. It gave me a console. Using the console, I reinstalled Panel. After this, when I tried to restart normally, I had the same problem.
I do not mind doing a complete new install. However, I have nearly 100 GB of wildlife photos on the hard disk. I cannot afford to lose them. In order to recover them, I created a live USB and booted with it. With that, I was able to recover most of the files to an external hard drive. However, a few very important folders (who are actually back-ups from an older machine themselves) have become inaccessible. I mean, each such folder has that tiny X mark at the bottom right hand corner of the folder icon. The system does not allow me to open the folder. I am ****-scared to do a fresh install as I have experienced long ago in Ubuntu, data created by earler installations becomes virtually inaccessible.
Could some of you good samaritans help me out of this? I need to either be able to do a regular boot (without the gnome fallback loop) or be able to take a back up of all those folders that have turned upon me.
To recap, I cannot open the gnome desktop. I have access only to the ‘Asparagus’ console - if I have to boot from the had-disk. Else, I can boot from a live cd but it blocks access tio some of the older (and important) folders.
In case this query needs to be moved to a different location, do please bung a brick at me and I shall attend to it immediately.
Thanks