Jan 4 after receiving an advisory for various updates I ran the updates. Soon thereafter I turned off the machine.
Jan 5: turned on machine and it appears to boot to runlevel 3. The only reason I think it is run level 3 is because I previously installed Nvidia drivers “the hard way” per the installation instructions on one of the openSUSE site and had to go to run level 3.
Fortunately I had a complete backup from Jan 3 and restored to that date. Startup just fine and here we go.
At this time I am unwilling to install any update until I can understand what may have happened. Any advice is appreciated!
If you install by hand (ie the hardway) then you must reinstall after an kernel update because the driver is linked to the kernel. You get a new kernel you no longer have a link. So at a command line as root go to where the NVIDIA installer is run it to reinstall reboot or just start X (int 5)
Note if you start X with init 5 you should go back to the terminal (ctrl-alt-F1) and log out as root since that session is still running as root.
The same thing (except that in my case it’s ATI instead of NVIDIA) happened to me today, and I had no idea what was going on :'(. Everything seems to be back on track after I reinstalled the proprietary ATI driver. Thanks for the explanation.