Mint 18.3 will no longer boot- need recovery suggestions

[ssfc72]

Ok I was attempting to burn a dvd movie onto a dvd-rw that had a very old bootable copy of Ubuntu, on it (I am using a portable usb dvd player/burner)
It looked like the burn process went fine but when I tried to play the dvd, it appeared the Ubuntu was still on the DVD and not the movie.

Now when I boot up my dual boot notebook computer, I believe I get past the login to Mint but hen a get a short text on the screen complaining about something being wrong with Cinnamon and that's as far as I can get.

To recover the Mint 18.3 operating system, can I just take a bootable usb pendrive, that has Mint 18.3 on it and do an install and Mint will re-install and maintain the existing data on the notebook computer?
Before I do this I will boot up Mint from the usb pen drive and try to access the Mint partition on the notebook and save any files, that I don't want to lose.

Thanks!

[Jason]

To recover the Mint 18.3 operating system, can I just take a bootable usb pendrive, that has Mint 18.3 on it and do an install and Mint will re-install and maintain the existing data on the notebook computer?

That depends on if your /home directory is on its own partition. I would expect that a new Mint install is going to want the root (/) reformatted to do that. If /home isn't on its own partition, that is going to get wiped, too. But I'm not entirely sure about that, it may be that you can choose not to format the root and it'll just copy over the existing files.

Do you Timeshift? If so, I'd back up your data files and do a restore from before the system was broken using the bootable pen drive using Timeshift on it. If Timeshift was only backing up the system files (which it does by default if you didn't change it), you will get your system restored with the data files untouched. But it's best to back them up locally or in the cloud to make doubly sure.

Not to be pushy but I've seen a lot of issues with system problems but nobody seems to use Timeshift, which is easy to get and easy to use and does multiple backups which you can set to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or even on boot (10 min after boot) with as many copies as you like. It comes with Linux Mint (I think in the 18.3 version, too) and you can download it for other distros from their website. Of course, you should put those backups on another drive or an external one in case that drive gets corrupted or just dies altogether.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the advice Jason!  I did not use Timeshift  on my Mint.  I did not have /home on it's own partition.
I was just wondering if when Mint installed that it might detect a Mint already on the notebook and give the option to just replace the system files.

I have gone into the drive with a bootable usb Mint and Puppy Linux and downloaded all the folders I could think of, to a portable HD.  I had to use Puppy Linux to try and get the Thunderbird files because when I was running the bootable Mint distro, I was getting I think permissions issues with files being able to copy. I hope I can restore my Thunderbird email with these copied Thunderbird files.

So, I think this will give me the incentive to just leave Windows 10 on the notebook and put it up for sale, since I have way too many notebook computers and this HP is one of the oldest.

[Jason]

So, I think this will give me the incentive to just leave Windows 10 on the notebook and put it up for sale, since I have way too many notebook computers and this HP is one of the oldest.

Yeah, there's always that! Mo' laptops, mo' problems! And you're welcome for the advice, for what it's worth, probably not much in this case!

[buster]

Pretty sure /home must be a separate partition. From Book 3:

"1. Use exactly the same user name and password as before.
2. Leave the hard drive partitions as before.
3. Choose wisely what you format, the key element.

So the old  root is to be formatted.
The old /home is NOT to be formatted. "

Sorry.

[Jason]

Pretty sure /home must be a separate partition. From Book 3:

No, it's not a "must", just a recommendation and a good one for the most part. In my case, I keep my /home on the same partition as / because every day it's fully backed up to my RAID 10 storage using Timeshift. So if I reinstall, I just restore from there. I'm using Kubuntu, though, but same principle.