saving the current installation-state

[satelliteuser083]

Is it possible (in 10.1 Official) to save the current installation-state PRIOR to introducing a change/mod, so that, if the new system fails to boot, the old one can be easily reinstated - via failsafe, perhaps. My reason for asking this is that I have twice tried to install acpi on my Tosh Satellite Pro, each time resulting in a freeze-up on reboot and the necessity, since I don't know of any other way of solving the problem, of a re-installation. Or perhaps some other kind of recovery process would do. Thanks.

[adamw]

No need to reinstall. Two ways to proceed. After enabling ACPI in the boot configuration, edit /etc/lilo.conf , make a copy of the default entry (the one named 'linux'), put it at the bottom, and change the part of the append= line that says 'acpi=on' to 'acpi=ht'. Change the name of this entry from 'linux' to 'linux-noacpi' or something, save lilo.conf, run lilo as root. Now you have a boot menu option which *doesn't* use ACPI, so you can still get in if ACPI doesn't work. Alternatively, you can just hit esc when you get to the boot menu and type 'linux acpi=off' or 'linux acpi=ht'.

[satelliteuser083]

I used your first solution - modifying lilo.conf - and that enabled me to recover from enabling acpi; thanks. We're clearly progressing ;-) Strangely, the portion 'acpi=on' was missing from the default entry in lilo.conf following enabling of acpi (although 'acpi=ht' was also gone), so I inserted it manually. Nevertheless, the system still freezes on boot, so something still seems to be wrong/missing.

I checked in rc5.d, which I understand is involved in defining the boot-sequence, and it contained the following entries: S01hotplug, S01udev, S03iptables, S04acpi, S04pcmcia. The system freezes after displaying 'starting pcmcia'. Will have to keep plugging away at this problem, but at least I can recover from the dreaded 'boot-freeze';

[adamw]

oh, right, that would be because we now have ACPI as the default (so if you pass nothing it turns acpi on, you have to pass acpi=ht or acpi=off explicitly to turn it off). Makes sense actually. If ACPI doesn't work there's usually not a whole lot you can do besides trying updated BIOSes and newer kernels (i.e., wait for the next MDK :>). Occasionally there's very obscure things you can do to fix ACPI issues, which you can usually find by examining the results of a Google for +"linux" +"mylaptopmodelname", but usually, something needs to be updated before it'll work, sadly.