What is the best way to recover a broken system

[tuaris]

Had a little catastrophe/accident on the storage level, but the system boots, but shows signs of corruption, then kernel panics.  I can access single user mode and see that the image appears to be damaged, conf files looks intact.  What is the best way to approach recovery?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

If you don't have a recent config backup from the UI, you might want to save /conf/config.xml by some means even if it's a FAT formatted USB drive.

Then do a fresh install and import the config.

[tuaris]

I have backups of the config.  I was hoping to avoid re-installing from scratch, perhaps some way to just overwrite the corrupted image file.

Is restoring from a config backup also going to restore my plugins and packages?

[tuaris]

Oh well.  Since this is a VM, I'll make a new virtual disk and do a fresh install and do the restore.  I wanted to see if I could save time,  but it's looking like that ship has sailed 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Restoring the config backup will mark your plugins as missing and the resolver in the System > Firmware menu will reinstall them. 2-step process but pretty simple.