I killed something (Noob alert)

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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1

So I just upgraded to mint 18 yesterday, yay fixed the problem I was having. Today I left my computer running, was on lock screen showed my friend a little bit of what linux was like, (basically explaining it was the same just free.) left and played a game of Hordes and War machines.

Got home and black screen.
Hard reset the computer,
Mint loading screen came up,
loaded,
screen went black,
screen turns off,
turn screen back on no signal screen turns back off.

I was messing around trying to change the desktop environment, didn't think I had changed anything, apparently I have.

I am using the boot usb to get on here, was just wanting to some how retrieve my steam games so I don't have to redownload them. Is there a way to access the partition with the installed version of mint? Or reset that to default or something I don't know.

2

basically try a live cd/make another live usb and just try to mount the partition, then if you have some other storage device you could copy the files there or whatever, but would probably try going to different tty like [ctrl][alt][f2] to see if the system is still running or if its just the display manager(the program you login/starts up the desktop environment of your choice) or the window manager(actual desktop environment)

and then if its running you could look up the configuration files and what they should look like if you want to try to fix it. but otherwise if you have another storage device large enough you could copy the files to that reinstall and copy them back basically

3

I'm on the live cd now. I want to get my steam games off then am happy to reinstall the os.

4

for future reference, always split your /home and root for this reason.

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5

I would try booting into recovery-mode and see what happened. It might be worth looking into as you might run into the same problem again.

For starters, I would start looking log files of X. Usually, they are in /var/log/X11.

Btw, Its totally possible to look at log files from the live-cd too.

As @dinscurge suggested, were you able to login using a different tty?

6

Sometimes this happens to me after upgrading the kernel. In grub you can select an older kernel to boot from if its still installed.

Most of the time is a borked display driver. Ive also had to boot into terminal in order to reinstall the correct driver.

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7

Recovery mode, logs, I understand the concepts I just have no idea how to find them.

Contemplating just fresh install and redownloading all my games.

Though I might try out cinnamon this time.

8

chances are it's recoverable. And it's good to learn how to recover from a failure now when you're not losing sleep over it.

I assume you're a complete noob, so what you'll want to do is figure out what disk your OS was installed on(usually /dev/sda(something). Try opening up a terminal and typing lsblk, that will print every disk connected to the system.

Next, mount it. I think mint has udisks, so you'll want to type 

udisks --mount /dev/sda<disk number here>

if that doesn't work, try

sudo mount /dev/sda<disk number here> /mnt

next, you'll want to get the logs. I'm pretty sure mint has systemd, so you can do

sudo chroot <either /mnt or wherever udisks mounted your disk>
journalctl -b 0

to get a kernel log of the last time you turned on your system(just look at the last few lines for anything scary)
you should also have your X11 logs at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Again, just look at the last few lines for scary things.

Once you post those here, it will be much easier to help.

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