Mint 8 is damaged so how do I start it in Recovery Mode?

[rwnz]

I've damaged my Mint 8 so that it starts through the splash screen then sits with a completely blank screen. This was caused when I removed nautilus and nautilus-share which I did because I'd seen it on a forum as being a solution to my initial problem of not being activate a desktop background, colour or screen saver. Looking through forums, it appears that starting in recovery mode may replace the missing packages. but I can't find or figure out how to do that (so perhaps it isn't the answer, but then what is?)! There is no menu or list of startup options during the startup process.

[DataMan]

Not sure about this, but you can try re-installing Nautilus and do a restart to see if everything is happy again.

At command line (recovery mode:

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt-get install nautilus

-DataMan

[rwnz]

Thanks DataMan. I did this and there was no improvement. It certainly downloaded and installed files after this command so I tried it again to confirm the process and this time it said all the files were already installed, so that proved to me that Nautilus had just been resinstalled. Then, I figured that as there is no GUI I'll try installing one, so I commanded it to install Gnome and more files were downloaded and installed, so it seems that the original removal of Nautilus also removed Gnome. I guess that if I'd known what I was doing at the start I would have closely inspected the list of components that were to be removed, and assume that Gnome would have been in it. Anyway, I now have my GUI back.

Oh - I should add that in order to enter the 'sudo apt-get install nautilus' command I first had to figure out how I went from a completely blank screen to Terminal, and I found on a forum that cntrl-alt-f3 does this.

However I still have my original problem that it will not display a background, desktop colour or screensaver.

And finally, I'd still like to know if there is a recovery or restore mode (so I haven't marked this question as solved).

[DataMan]

And finally, I'd still like to know if there is a recovery or restore mode (so I haven't marked this question as solved).

Unless you are actively backing up your ops and related, you're probably pretty much out of luck there. If you are relatively new to the installation, you might want to consider a re-installation as it may be the shortest distance between the two points. Assuming you have already established some settings etc, you could backup your /home to a remote device. Once the new installation has occurred, then mount the storage device and refresh your new /home with the settings from this ops (probably want to omit gnome nautilus and related that are causing problems now.

This is just my perspective on a possible recovery. Stay tuned a bit and other members may chime in with "door #2" and "door #3" .

-DataMan

[rwnz]

I'll note that I've now solved the original problem that started this - that I had the bar displayed at the bottom of the screen but the rest of the screen was black (no background, no screensaver, no mounted drives, & couldn't change the colour), and that all applications ran OK and had no display issues. I've found that the default resolution was set to a 5:3 aspect ratio but when I changed it to 4:3 (which is what the screen is) everything came right. I hadn't paid attention to this before as the display was clear and didn't stand out as being distorted (and of course I would not have expected it to have this detrimental effect). The auto-detected monitor it had in the display settings was also correct.

Any comment on the topic that is the title of this forum query is still welcome for my general knowledge.

[rwnz]

Oops - I was wrong about my display resolution. After deciding that the quality of display with the 4:3 setting is questionable, I checked the monitor spec's and it is actually 5:4 / 1280 x 1024 pixels! I switched a number of times between the two settings and most of the time the background desktop image disappears when it is set to 1280 x 1024, and reappears when it is returned to 1280 x 960 pixels, and the desktop display of mounted drives always disappears at 1280 x 1024, so I'll post this problem as a separate forum topic.