as long as you are adequately backed-up, you can always make alterations and see what happens(especially after a warm-restart and/or cold-boot)

had a similar experience when my active partition had very little free space left. don't remember how "little" the actual amount was. as always, your mileage may vary.

@greenjeans

just touching base. curious on status of a new Vuu-do?

thanks,

sg1

have used clonezilla and partedmagic for many years with much success

clonezilla is free
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonezilla

partedmagic is more "full-service" and well-worth their minimal charge(imho)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartedMagic

copying _anything_ in an incorrect way has the potential to alter ownerships and/or permissions
(hard to check 1000's of files/folders for complete correctness)

hopefully your original is _still_ intact and completely correct

unless you can verify the complete correctness of any/all copies you should consider them _not_authentic_duplicates_
(especially and specifically with respect to ownerships and permissions)

also, just to clarify, a backup isn't a backup if it is just on a different partition of the same physical device

operations on the underlying formating/partitioning of any/all storage devices should be considered totally destructive of _all_data_ on that device

keep us posted on your progress!

may/may-not help but found this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/m5acph/comment/hbxq9ym/

just ran across this:

https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/dynebolic-linux-return-falls-short-of-creative-goals-177381.html

@nauved-rex, you are not alone in returning to Chimaera after being unsatisfied with Daedalus.

thanks for posting your resolution to this query.

Excalibur?

it is possible that your backlight either has failed or isn't turning on.
have experienced that with several laptops over the years.
your description of "screen goes from black to dark gray" supports this hypothesis.
it might be possible to shine a light source at the screen to read and navigate the menus/selections/etc.
we used flashlights but other concentrated/directed illumination might work also.

if it is a backlight failure then using an external monitor might be an answer depending on your particular usage.

keep us posted on your progress!