Little back story. I am an old geezer and nerd at heart. My kids call me Sheldon.
I made the plunge over a year ago, I went all in, and I proudly (or attempt to) use my Manjaro powered Thinkpad P52 professionally for a small engineering consulting business I have and have done my best to distance myself from Windows as much as possible and I have been totally fascinated with the world of Linux and have been bitten by the Open Source bug.
BUT!! This stuff is really challenging for me and I struggle to understand the technical aspect of it all. I read and read, but it is like drinking from a fire hose.
Summarized to the best I can: I updated my system and lost my external monitor support. I had read about Timeshift and how awesome of a tool it was and installed it along time ago. So struggling to fix my issues, I thought it was time to put Timeshift to work and initiated a rollback.
Then I was met with the Grub error: grub.debug.malloc. I Googled my corn dog fingers to death and found references to everything but malloc. Calloc was the closest sounding thing.
I have three hard drives on my machine and they are all discombobulated. Initially I thought it safer to plunge into the world of Linux by segregating Manjaro into its own drive. However, I evidently and ignorantly some how managed to install two versions of Windows on two separate drives, as well as two versions of Manjaro on one drive. Not sure how I managed all of that. But in my attempt to boot into the system with a fresh Manjaro ISO, I now have 3 versions of Manajaro installed. But in all of this technically challenging frustration, and on a positive note, I did overwrite one of the windows installs with a new Manjaro in the process, so on the bright side I am one step closer to being free from Windows.
However, in what seems like a game of Russian roulette, I can now use my machine at least and have access to all of my data via my previous and broken Manjaro install.
Can someone please point me to a really dumbed down tutorial, on how I might could rescue my home folder with all my settings, programs, etc… and move it to my new shiny install of Manajaro and clean up the mess?
I have managed to also locate my old home folder and the config file for Grub, in the event that editing the old grub file might provide a solution somehow.
FYI, my old daily driver version of Manajaro was also sick and has been telling me that it could not load the Postgres SQL server for months now. But looking into that issue was pretty scary sounding and things seemed to work okay, so I left sleeping dogs alone as they say.
I would appreciate any pointers, direction to any very basic tutorials that I could attempt to being to understand it all, etc… Such as what is a shell? What is and how to boot into TTY, or any similar type information that I spent the entire day and most of last night reading.
Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.