I'm looking to learn Linux and I have an old office computer running Debian, which I set up for a Minecraft server. However, I've run various commands without understanding them, and now my system is acting weird. I can physically access the computer, but I don't have a keyboard to select the USB drive in the BIOS. I'm wondering if there are commands or programs that can help me factory reset the system. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
If you have a wireless keyboard with a USB dongle, it could work since those are recognized as wired USB keyboards by the system. Do you happen to have one?
You're going to need a physical keyboard to reinstall it, since you can't select the USB drive in BIOS otherwise. How did you manage to run commands before? Seems tricky!
I used a keyboard for setup, and then I SSH into the machine once it’s running.
If your system is still running, it might be better to try fixing what's wrong instead of going for a full reinstall, especially since if that fails, you can't recover until you get a keyboard. You could `dd` a preinstalled image to a drive, but that needs SSH access on that image already. You'd also want to make sure it boots correctly by installing a boot manager in the right path on the EFI partition.
I don’t have any keyboard at all.