As of a few days ago I noticed my computer would at times lose its ability to connect to the Internet – often still indicating it was connected, just not actually connected in practice – and this was often accompanied by Firefox freezing, trouble shutting down, or failure to restart. The last time it happened, maybe an hour ago, I decided that the problem was severe enough to warrant me using Timeshift. And so I backed up all my files; tried looking up whether Timeshift was safe; and then bit the bullet and did the thing. But then Timeshift seemed to get stuck rebooting, so I looked up whether it was safe to do a hard shutdown, and it seemed to be, so I did it.

Tried to turn on my computer again and I was met with a screen reading “KERNEL PANIC! Please reboot your computer. VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)”

Cursed a lot; messaged some friends about it but have only gotten read receipts and consolation; all I can think to do now is use my months-old live USB and just reinstall everything. Is there anything else I can do?

I’m just so pissed off about this, I swear.

Edit: I selected recovery mode from the bootloader and that fixed it. We are Back Baby!!

Edit 2: From what these comments are saying I guess things aren’t quite so straightforward. I have no-one to blame but myself. Saiaku.

Edit 3: Looks like it wasn’t the fact that I used recovery mode that let me start my computer like normally, but the fact that I chose the bottom option from the “advanced settings” list.