The motherboard of my recently installed and updated Leap 15.0 died. I’ve replaced it and need to re-install. Same hard drive. Much of the time spent on re-installing is added software both from Leap 15.0 repositories and third party. If I don’t format my root and home partitions will that save me from repeating the long process? Will the install over-write necessary hardware dependent files?
Thanks for any advice.
easiest way is to select upgrade this will keep programs and such, you will have to update to get back to where you were.
A bit harder is to simply reset up Grub. Assuming EFI booting you basically need to let the UEFI flash know about the efi boot partition and files. Best to run mkinitrd to allow the system to discover the new hardware.
A new install will overwrite all in root and you have to explicitly tell the installer NOT to format home jist mount it at /home. Be sure to select use old partitions ( forget the exact words) or manually select them. Do not allow the installer to choose without direction.
Upgrade is best if you are unsure it is pretty built proof. Be sure to read and understand the partition scheme page before you accept!
Why? Did you try to simply boot your installed system? What did not work in this case?
In case arvidjaar’s response was not clear: how was “need” determined?
Yes I did try. It stops at not recognizing the drive UUID. Of course I could correct that in grub by defining it as /dev/sda2 but I thought that .Xauthority would be a problem as well.
Doubt you need to worry about .Xauthority but you can delete that file and it will be recreated.
UUID should be the same if you are using the same drive.
What boot method do you use UEFI and MBR. They present different problems/solutions.
Yes I thought that the UUID sould be the same too. But that’s where it stops booting.
I do not use UEFI that I know of. More precisely there is no UEFI partition. I am quite ignorant of how UEFI works and I subscribe to the Yankee philosophy “If it ain’t broke…don’t fix it.”
Now here’s a puzzling result. I have another distro (MX-18) installed on the drive, and it boots and runs normally, so it should be easier to fix my Leap 15 startup without booting a live distro.
Following instructions elsewhere on this forum I did the following:-
chroot into the system from your rescue:
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
chroot /mnt
re-init grub2:
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Edit:
And then reboot.
I must have done something wrong because the reboot stopped at the same point. So I gave up and I am re-installing.
Thanks to all for the assistance, and sorry I took up your time.