hi everyone, nice to pop in after some time away.
it's a little fuzzy to me now, but in late February my Solus installation got messed up - I think I was running an update and the computer just stuck on a black screen for ages and I ended up hard-rebooting it.
annoyingly, I seem to have suffered a hardware failure at the exact same time (maybe the cause in the first place?) and my computer would just shut off a few seconds after booting into an OS. any OS - I tried Solus on a USB stick, Mint on a USB stick, Windows on an old hard drive... same problem.
this was extremely poorly-timed, and due to numerous overlapping and exhausting things going on in my life, I haven't had time to delve into it until now. but I got a working computer, swapped my disks into it, and I am able to boot into Solus, but when I choose Budgie from the session menu I just get a black screen with a moveable cursor, and maybe a notification popping up in the corner. no wallpaper, no panel, no hotkeys.
I was able to switch to a TTY, perform a full system update, run eopkg check and repair broken packages (linux-current, and something else which I can't remember), and remove old kernels from /boot and run sudo clr-boot-manager updatesuccessfully (this has been a bit of a problem for a while, my boot partition is too small and I'm nervous about resizing it).
I can now boot into Openbox, which is one of the WMs/DEs I had installed, but none of the others work (Budgie, i3, XFCE). this is originally a Budgie installation and I'd like to get back to using that.
I took a full backup of my main SSD, so if I have to resize my partitions, or wipe it and start again, then it's not the end of the world, but it would be easier and nicer if I can repair this installation. I've been on it since 2019, would be sad to break my streak 😅
just wondering if there's anything else I've missed here. I've looked through all the boot rescue stuff in the help centre (which was helpful, thank you!) - can anyone point me in the right direction or is this a lost cause? any log files or config files to check? commands to run?
I would have just bought a new large SSD but apparently the slop-peddlers have ruined that for us. about a 4-5x price increase since I got mine 😥
