Hello, JosephBeck.
Sorry to learn things seem have to developped in a very unpleasant way.
So far the situation seemed to be that
+ fonts had been installed, maybe some fonts removed
+ Software Manager seemed to fail because it could not find some (hardcoded?) font.
All this might have been tricky to analyze and tricky to fix.
But there was not reason to assume the whole desktop environment might become unusable.
Your last post suggests that some software components, some basic configuration details, whatever may have been damaged beyond repair, maybe, maybe not. Honestly, the story you tell definitely leaves more open questions than it answers.
- The problems booting from a LiveUSB may have all kind of reasons. But it is not really likely that they have been caused by the Mint 16 makers. If this were the case, then how have you ever managed to boot the Mint 16 live system before and setup the system which now may or may not be damaged beyond repair. Whatever may have ruined the Mint system on your harddisk, it cannot have ruined your LiveUSB system at the same time.
- An interesting detail is that the Windows XP setup cannot detect your harddisk. Is this really true? Does it not detect the harddisk? Or does it only not see any partition on the harddisk which it understands? Windows XP is unable to use an EXT4 formatted disk partition. But it would call it unknown. So it would see it, but call it unknown. Provided the Windows XP setup does not see any harddisk at all, then this might be a hint that your machine has been affected by some kind of hardware defect. Again such a defect cannot be blamed on the Mint 16 makers.
- The only damage that can turn your laptop into a worthless piece of junk is a serious hardware defect. No operating system, Windows XP or Mint, will have this effect, no matter how much the operating system may have been screwed up.
- The most irritating detail about this weird development from a minor nuisance to a major end of the world scenario is the details that have not been mentioned at all: no technical details about the affected machine have been spotted so far, although a simple "inxi -Fx" would have been a quick action and provided a concise overview on the hard- and software configuration.
OK, I guess this will be the end of this thread.
I do hope that you will manage to get your laptop back up and running and that it has not been affected by any kind of serious hardware defect, which is beyond repair, because repairing notebooks/laptop often is more expensive than buying a new machine.
Cheers,
Karl
