So I was trying to sort videos not playing in browsers AGAIN. Went through all the steps in my previous thread on this, to no avail. Found I had 2 VLC listed in apps, so tried to get rid of one or
both, but it said they couldn't be uninstalled. Went to Synaptic and deleted all VLC references, then couldn't boot back into Zorin. But ignore all that for now
I reinstalled Zorin and Time shift and tried to restore Time shift backup and ended up with no boot.
Did the same thing again. First, this is how my SSD drive looks with a fresh Zorin installation
Now, when I go to restore the backup, Time shift says the partitions that the files were backed up from have been preselected, but the first option is blank and it doesnt work.
This is why I don't recommend using Timeshift as a backup solution...
First let me say that I personally don't use Timeshift myself, so I may be misunderstanding how it works. But I've seen issues like this a few times already where it doesn't work to restore a fresh installation to a previous state.
Timeshift is meant as a "safety net", if you will. When you run an update that goes wrong, or install something that made some unexpected changes, etc., you can rollback to a previous snapshot. However, restoring fully from scratch seems to be something that it doesn't handle very well.
@Tombar do you happen to know if the current drive looked the same before you re-installed it? I suspect you may need to have the exact same setup.
And now, after being turned off and on, it's stopped booting with the installed Zorin or any USB drive I try, like the other day. Tried 2 USB2 and 2 USB ports.
I wonder if the SSD has died? Sometimes I hear it firing up, but not others - anyway, it doesn't work in either case. Replaced the CMOS battery - didn't help. Doing a CMOS reset has been suggested on another site. Will give it a go.
Edit. SSD is fine - I took it out and put it in an enclosure and tested it on my Windows computer
I suspect the computer IS booting, but I've messed up the display, so can't get any display however I boot
The key icon in GParted indicates the partition is in use and can't be worked with at the time, given a quick search. / will always be mounted. I imagine /boot stays mounted, but I don't know for certain. In order to work with them in GParted, they'd need to boot from a live USB, so the partitions to be handled aren't mounted.
Just also wanting to make sure; In your Boot Menu, when selecting either Ubuntu boot option after you've restored the files, do either of them work? None of them? Do they give you errors of some description?
That first screenshot is when the computer was working after a fresh install, so no problem at that time. The problems start when I run Time shift to restore my backup
As I said above, I'm not trying to create a new installation. I install Zorin again from my USB drive, THEN use Time shift to restore the backup.
At the time,the Rescuezilla USB wasn't working
The Timeshift repository mentions that it can be used for "Cross-Distribution Restore", so this should work, in theory. But I found another issue raised with a similar problem restoring across reinstalls.
Unfortunately, not a lot of activity in the issue tracker so we'll have to wait and see what the Tiemshift developers have to say about this.
Again, I'm not familiar with how Timeshift works and how it would handle situations like this, but it makes sense from the description of this issue that the culprit is with the UUID of the newly formatted partitions. Assuming this indeed the problem, you can try a hacky workaround that problem by manually editing the system configuration files that describe the mount points at boot...
First, try running these commands in the terminal to see what the current state it:
ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
tail /etc/fstab
You should get something like the screenshot below:
You Linux people seem to have a different approach to restoring the computer as it was. If I can't get into Windows, I either reinstall Windows, then one of my backup programs and restore everything, or I run the DVD that takes me directly to the backup programme, then I restore everything. I don't call this a new installation, I call it restoring the old installation.
I assumed reinstalling Zorin, then Time shift and restoring my Time shift backup, followed by something like Duplicity or Lucky would be similar
For what it is worth, I agree with you. It would seem to make sense that reinstalling the OS on the same hardware with all the same information, then running the TimeShift restoration should work.
But above, @zenzen hit the nail on the head. He offers suggestions for managing this issue.
And also points out that no one person is an expert in all things.
I too, do not know a great deal about TimeShift's inner workings.
It's not an unreasonable thing to assume, but at the end of the day Linux is different than Windows, and it also makes sense that some things are different. I would say that this is simply a bug, even though they claim it should work under these circumstances.
If you can, please take a look at my previous post again, hopefully we can get this sorted.
