My Son Accidentally Wiped My Laptop’s OS – What Now?

That command wipes the entire drive, but you can still reinstall the OS. The "no kernel found" message usually indicates that you're trying to boot into a non-existent system. Just use a USB flash drive with the installation files, boot from it, and install the OS fresh. Just make sure your son doesn't have root access next time!

You'll definitely need to boot off a USB drive to fix this. You should check your BIOS settings and change the boot order if necessary. If the bootloader is still looking for the original install, that could be the issue. If all else fails, you can clean up the first 512 bytes of your disk, but only if you're okay with losing everything.

Just to clarify, you do know that giving him sudo access was a mistake, right? Unless you have backups, the OS and all data is gone, and you’ll need to reinstall from a USB. Just don't try to use the drive anymore if you need any files recovered.

You might want to check the UEFI interface as well. Depending on your laptop's firmware, there’s a small chance running that command may have caused more issues. If you can still access UEFI, you can attempt to reinstall the OS from there. Just keep a close eye on your son’s computer usage until he learns not to mess with admin commands!

I'm curious, why did your son run that command? Did he think it would fix something? Anyway, to reinstall Linux, you'll need to boot from a thumb drive that has the installer on it. Your current system is essentially gone, but as long as you use that USB, you should be fine. Just wipe everything and start over.