[SOLVED] How Get Out Of Hot Water

[tee4two]

I have recently installed Petra 16 KDE. Of course I wanted some of the cool html5 animated mdm themes.
Found some of samriggs' themes on Deviant Art read and followed all the suggestions regarding how to install the themes,
and I always ended up with an unbootable machine, with no possibility to enter my password to boot.
Very annoying. Being prudent, I always had a system image ready so I could restore and start again.

On one of these unbootable situations, I pressed the <Shift> key to enter the Grub2 menu. The only useful option
available was to boot to a root console. However once at the root console the filesystem is read only,
Not much to be done there.

My question should the need arise in the future how can I circumvent a read only filesystem?

Positive note: On the Linux Mint Art site a .deb of the Html5 animated Mdm themes is available and they work.

Thanks all who have read this post;
Found the answer. Instead of paraphrasing here is the link (for anyone else wondering how to enter recovery mode instead of re-installing - And if you already knew this sorry for being a bore)
http://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/li ... nt-12.html

[Orbmiser]

What I do is to backup partitions before making major changes or testing new distro's.
Using LiveCD http://redobackup.org/ Redo Backup.
Which is a simpler version of Clonezilla and backup my partitions to external usb drive.
Not on the same drive as the OS is on.

Then I can restore over the offending partitions or return to my production desktop knowing everything will work.
I do this before major updates once a month so know if a update or I tweak to much and break it can restore in 10mins.
Also allows me to test and tryout different distro's knowing I can return at any time to my old working setup.
.

[tee4two]

Thanks.
Did not know about RedoBackup...10mins sounds attractive

[Orbmiser]

Thanks.
Did not know about RedoBackup...10mins sounds attractive

Well that is backing up a 12gb root and 15gb /home partition.
Of course larger the partitions the longer to backup and restore.
.

[tee4two]

Edited from [SOLVED] to still (in the dark ).
I think redo backup will take me as long as with clonezilla. I have root 20GB and Home has 200GB used.
Besides I still don't know how to handle this read only filesystem stuff.