How I got it back up: 1. mounted partition on older disk 2. mounted --bind the live's /dev with the partition's 3. chroot to partition folder 4. mount fstab entries, i.e. var, tmp, etc. 5 run update-initramfs -u, which ran without complaint, runs lilo as well, without complaint
The question is: A partition on another one terra with the same files, fstab and lilo.conf appropriately edited to make this partition root -- Why will not the same procedure work? Get segfaults trying anything chrooted here! The original root partition from the install is too small to accept the current root contents to return to it. Problem is system freezing up with nouveau reading cache errors, near-unusable That older disk was smart-flagged as "pre-failure." The errors may be from the disk (or may be from bug in KDE's graphics/compositiing). I filed a bug on iceweasel so-explained because it happens often using or after using iceweasel (but certainly not exclusively).
