How to copy documents, files from broken silverblue?

Ask Fedora
1

Hello,
I think my silverblue OS died - it is not booting up, it hangs just before grub os selection appears. Is it possible to recover documents and files from the HDD? I put it in enclosure and folder are visible, but it seems no files in them?

1 Like
2

Yes it is totally possible and I needed to rescue my system too some time ago.

I would highly appreciate if people smarter than me could find a way to just swap out the ostree image and boot stuff and get the system working again, no matter how crushed it is.

For rescuing your data, of course it is possible if it is there. But we need a lot more infos.

  • what desktop are you currently using
  • luks or not
  • how did you mount the drive
  • what do you see
  • did you try admin: to access the drive with elevated privileges?

Have a look at the howto I did recently.

3

Me too : )
I wonder why it might have happened in first place. Maybe because I was running out of space in HDD?
Yes, I managed to find my files and documents. They where in: …/fedora_fedora/root/ostree/deploy/fedora/var/home

4

Very likely the cause.

5

Years ago with XFS on SGI IRIX64 there was an option to block user writes to disks that were nearly full. From man mke2fs:

-m reserved-blocks-percentage
     Specify the percentage of the file system blocks reserved for the super-user.  This avoids fragmentation,  and
     allows  root-owned  daemons,  such  as  syslogd(8),  to  continue  to  function correctly after non-privileged
     processes are prevented from writing to the file system.  The default percentage is 5%.

I don’t see anything like this in Fedora man pages for XFS and btrfs.