Reinstall part of system?

I’m writing from a live CD once more. Booting brings me to a GRUB rescue prompt.
I appear to be missing the /etc and /lib folders; I haven’t looked closer yet.
Naturally, I haven’t taken a full system backup recently.
It looks like reinstalling is once more the best option, but I’d not like to lose /home.
Is it possible to selectively reinstall some of the system (/etc, /lib, boot)?
If not, is there danger in reinstalling and then copying the old /home into the new install?
Thanks in advance.

Since there’s been no response in 4 hours, I’m just going to back up /home and do a complete reinstall.

Restoring /home should be fine. Even easier if you have a separate /home partition and simply avoid formatting that during a reinstall; you need to reinstall your software but your settings for each application should be preserved.

Question is why these directories went AWOL. Accidental deletion or maybe the hard disk having signs of failure? … Worth checking the SMART status, etc…

Hard disk’s fine.
I have reason to believe it was either a package gone rouge or a typo in an rm command.
Thanks for your help.

This is what worked for me. I did a reinstall using the manual partitioning option but not formatting my root partition. I don’t have a seperate home partition. I also deleted and recreated my boot partition. After the reboot it worked perfectly with no losses from my home folder.

Reinstalled, then copied over /home. It worked, but I lost ownership of the directory, causing a couple of issues.
I’m currently waiting for chown -R redbrain /home to finish, and I’l edit with success or not.
Once more, thank you all for your help.

It’s working just as it was before now, thank you everyone!

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