I just booted a live iso in qemu and installed vbox. I had to say those words in my head before I realized how weird it is. Anyway, I got the same error messages as you. Before I did it, I checked in sysv-rc-conf to see where dbus starts, and it starts in 2-5, not S. I checked beowulf, ascii, chimaera, jessie and wheezy. All the same.

There's no mention of dbus in /etc/init.d/vbox* or /var/lib/dpkg/info/virualbox-6.1.* so I don't know where that message is coming from.

I don't have any ideas for the usb. Yes I do. Not a fix; just a workaround. Someone I know used shared folders with a usb mounted on the host system.

I have not read any accounts of anyone migrating from devuan to debian or other debian-based systemd distro. You would be cutting a new trail.

Obviously, you would need to add a mint or debian repo to your sources to install banned packages. You might need to do some creative pinning to prevent a disaster. Either that or do a full migration back to LMDE. Please write it up if you do. Thanks. Good luck.

Cool! Please tell us a little about what desktop environment and display (login) manager is installed. And if you have autologin set for your installed system, please describe how you did that. The live-config scripts set up autologin for the live environment. Maybe two settings are competing.

Optional: At the isolinux boot menu, press TAB to edit the boot line and add the one word, noautologin. And see if it boots to a login screen. Or maybe it'll boot to desktop.

One thing that might help is to edit /etc/refractasnapshot.conf to set save_work="yes". Normally, the copy of the filesystem gets deleted after the snapshot.iso is made. If the work dir is not deleted, we can do some forensic inspection and some other tricks, maybe.

Also...
I did not see any indication of a common problem in the log file you sent me, but looking again at your df output has me wondering if you're running out of space. You posted:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       8.6G  4.0G  4.2G  49% /
/dev/sda2       8.5G  3.0G  5.0G  38% /home
/dev/sda6       247G   98G  138G  42% /media/data

I see 4G of operating system plus 3G of home used. That's a total of 7G unless you added a bunch of stuff to the excludes file. I'm guessing you did not do that. Refractasnapshot makes a copy of the entire system (minus what's listed in the excludes file) and puts that copy in /home/snapshot. But you only have 5G free space in /home.

You can switch the location of work_dir and snapshot_dir in the config file. Change this:

snapshot_dir="/home/snapshot"
work_dir="/home/work"
efi_work="${work_dir}/efi-files"

  To this:

snapshot_dir="/media/data/snapshot"
work_dir="/media/data/work"
efi_work="${work_dir}/efi-files"

Then run refractasnapshot.

The prefix is hard-coded in grub-efi-amd64-signed. I'm not sure what changed in this last update. I first ran into this problem a year ago. If you remove the signed package and just keep grub-efi-amd64 it should fix the problem. Usually. And not if you need to use secure boot.

I had a similar problem, and Ralph's advice helped, but I had to delete those links a few times.

There are three hard drives in this computer. Up until a few months ago, when I plugged in a usb, it would be named /dev/sdd. Then one day it changed to /dev/sde. I've seen this in the past after pulling out a usb without unmounting it, but that always clears with a reboot. This has persisted.

I looked in /dev/disk/* and there were two links to /dev/sdd. One was 'Generic usb something' and the other was 'pci-something' that corresponded to the usb controller slot. I deleted those links two or three times, and they kept coming back. Then I deleted /dev/sdd along with them. That seems to have done it.

Confirmed that ComputerBob's problem is not the same as yours. He has a full initrd.img (24M).

@ComputerBob:
When you return to this, here's a simple check to see if your problem is the same as dice's. Adjust the file name if you have a different kernel.

ls -lh /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-14-amd64

Do you recall if you did an expert install and chose to only have drivers targeted for your hardware in the initramfs? If you don't recall, that's fine. The output of the command above will tell us. It'll either be big or small. (I want the number, please.)

Unpack the initramfs from the bad iso and also the one from the good iso and compare them. (Hint: meld is a good program for comparing files and directories.) Use unmkinitramfs instead of the commands I posted in that other thread. It's easier. Plus, the command I posted for computerbob won't work for your initrd.img.

I have a couple of chimaera-based live isos here:
https://get.refracta.org/files/testing/

No xorg. No non-free. Run 'refractainstaller' to install to hard drive. Or do a debootstrap install.

Sorry for the tease. That link might be one of my special powers as admin.

And if you are logged in, there's a link that says 'Mark SOLVED' just below the edit button and next to the link that says 'Post reply'.