Installation Recovery

Recover a Kubuntu Focus Installation

All general purpose OSes (Windows, MacOS, Linux) can be changed so that the system will no longer boot completely or behaves strangely. A corrupt or full system disk, broken software packages, misconfiguration, and many other situations can cause this. Luckily, FocusRx recognizes and fixes many of these issues.

• Limitations
• Take a Snapshot with USB Drive
• Recover from BusyBox Shell
• Fix Your System Using FocusRx
• Use a Live USB for Recovery
• Use chroot to Recover a System
• Troubleshooting
• Revisions
• Disclaimer

Please read the disclaimer before proceeding. This solution is updated regularly. If you have suggestions or requests, please share your thoughts on the Guided Solution Authorship Form.

Limitations

Before you begin proceed, you will first want to determine if this is actually a system issue. If your system boots fine, this is likely an application issue. We recommend you first visit the Focus support page and search for a Guided Solution using the list or the search box. These are almost always more current and correct for your hardware than HOWTOs or forum posts you might find on the web. You should proceed here only if your system does not completely boot or if you are getting warnings about missing dependencies or libraries.

Recovering an installation may be preferable because applications, settings, and other data will not need to be restored. However, like with all OSes, a badly broken system can take hours to recover and still be problematic. While a Clean Install requires recovery of data, it usually takes well under 30 minutes and can solve issues you do not have time to research or understand. For these reasons, we recommend you always keep a clean installation as an alternative and limit the time you dedicate to recovery efforts.

Take a Snapshot with USB Drive

We encourage our customers back-up their data frequently to ensure it is safe. The best way to do this is to adjust the BackInTime settings to use an external disk. If you do this, make sure you adjust the backup filter to allow larger files and test your backups to ensure you capture all the data you need. Another handy technique is to copy your home directory to a USB drive which is described below.

• Select a USB drive. Use a drive with a capacity large enough to accommodate your data (128-1024 GB). Also, use a drive designed to use USB 3.0+ transfer rates. We use the SanDisk Extreme Pro, which offers capacities up to 1TB and transfer speeds up to 420/380 MBps read/write. The 512 GB capacity drive cost less than $100 as of 2021-08-21. Lesser drives with good write-speeds can cost far less.
• Open the Dolphin file manager. It will show a panel on the left and a file area on the right.
• Click on the path above the file area and select /home. You should now see all user home directories on your system.
• Click on the Split icon at the top right to split the file area in two. Click on an empty space in the right-hand file area to make it active.
• Insert a formatted USB drive. Within 5 seconds, a USB drive device should appear on the bottom left side of Dolphin window under Devices. Click on this device to show its contents in the right-hand file area.
• Copy the desired folders from the /home directory to the USB drive by dragging them from the left-hand file-area to the right-hand file area. When prompted, select copy. Do NOT move the directories as this could harm your system!.
• Once all files are copied, the backup is complete.

Because of file permissions, you may not be able to copy all files. When this happens, it may be helpful to run Dolphin as root. One can add this capability like so: Click on [Hamburger Menu] > Configure Dolphin… > Services > Download New Services…. Then search for and install "Open Dolphin As Root".

Recover from BusyBox Shell

Sometimes the system will boot but drop to a BusyBox Shell as shown below.

This frequently results from a corrupt file system, as detailed by this Ask Ubuntu ticket. The solution is to enter the command exit into the shell to report the corrupt file system. You may then repair it using fsck <device-file> as shown below.

After the file system repair is complete, type in reboot or exit to reboot the system. If the repair was good (which it usually is), the system should now boot normally.

Fix Your System Using FocusRx

Focus systems have a recovery tool called FocusRx. This can directly resolve many issues:

• Check if the /boot partition is too full and fix it
• Check and remove any xorg.conf file
• Repair broken or incomplete packages
• Update and reinstall key libraries
• Analyze NVIDIA GFX, CUDA, and DL libraries and harmonize so they work
• Fix many third-party repositories and remove duplicates and conflicts
• Update the initial RAM disk

You can run FocusRx as shown below.

• Connect to an Ethernet cable and AC power.
• Reboot the system. If the default kernel does not boot, use the kernel selection screen, Advanced Options to select a different kernel if available.
• If you can boot to a GUI, sign in and run Startup Menu > Kubuntu Focus > FocusRx.
• If you cannot boot to a GUI but instead see a black screen and cursor, press [ctrl][alt][f2] to get a virtual terminal. Sign in as your user and then enter focusrx -f.
• If the tool shows your system disk is 100% full, you should remove unneeded files to free at least 10 GB before proceeding.
• Follow the prompts and reboot when finished.

Use a Live USB for Recovery

Please Download the ISO Disk Image and create a bootable, live USB. Then return here to proceed.

Boot using the USB stick as shown below.

• Insert the USB stick in a USB type A port on your Focus.
• Turn on your Focus computer. Once you see the Focus logo, press F2 repeatedly on your keyboard.
• Select Boot Manager from the BIOS options on the screen, using either the touchpad or your cursor keys.
• Select the USB drive from the list of drives to boot.
• Select Start Kubuntu from the boot menu.
• Select Try Kubuntu from the graphical prompt.

Use chroot to Recover a System

1. Use the live USB to boot into the Try Kubuntu mode.

2. If you do NOT have an encrypted drive, skip to step 3. Otherwise, decrypt it now.

3. Mount the partition on /mnt.

If you haven’t yet backed up your data, please do so NOW! See the Take a Snapshot with USB Drive section above for guidance. You can find your user data under /mnt/home/. While each subsequent step below is usually safe, each brings additional risk because of unknown system state or human error. Better safe than sorry.

4. Mount /boot and efi paritions.

5. Prepare and use chroot.

6. Once the system has successfully switch to chroot mode, run FocusRx. See the section on FocusRx above for what this fixes.

See this article for additional details on using chroot

Here are a few more steps you might try if FocusRx does not solve the problem:

• Attempt to fix broken packages using apt by typing sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade (this is also done by FocusRx).
• Use aptitude for ncurses-based graphical package management to install or uninstall packages that may have caused the problem. This interface can be navigated using a keyboard and/or mouse.

If you are still seeing issues, we recommend you contact support@kfocus.org.

Troubleshooting

Content will be added as needed.

Revisions

This is a partial revision history. See the git repository for all entries.

• 2021-08-22 c1974de6 Add CHROOT Recovery Steps
• 2021-08-22 c1974de6 Add USB Drive Snapshot
• 2021-08-19 20a66a1c Add Busybox Shell Recovery
• 2021-08-05 c25e459e Fix Grammar Mistakes
• 2021-07-23 9e6157ce Add FocusRx Direction
• 2021-05-17 c75588e9 First Version

Disclaimer

We try hard to provide a useful solution validated by professionals. However, we cannot anticipate every situation, and therefore cannot guarantee this procedure will work for your needs. Always backup your data and test the solution to determine the correct procedure for you.

THIS SOLUTION IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOLUTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.