u/FluffyOne9245

Pre-rant request: *PLEASE* don't make fun of me, I'm in ZERO mood, and will bail at the first sign of trouble... I'm already on the verge of scrapping the system, and if this goes south, too, then I'm just gonna junk it and say "I'm done"...

Now then... I messed up big time, I was TRYING to do a backup, and needed to shrink the filesystem, that screwed the booter up, used a live USB to find out what's going on, nothing worked, reformatted the GRUB install, so now my system has no boot loader AND won't boot correctly, and pretty much everything that COULD go wrong, HAS... on top of external things happening... and it only gets worse from here...

There MUST be some god I can pray to who can help... grub-install, or more rather... "grub-" anything doesn't exist anymore... Deb version of choice is 12, because that's what hosts my phone system... so it's CRITICAL that I lose ZERO files, except for core files, of course, like the system files that came with Debian... removal of the internal drive isn't possible because it's an NVME drive and I have no access to the slots on my desktop mobo, recovery mode has been NO help, even right now, it's hard for me to go over the situation in its entirety because it's making me unbearably emotional... so I'm sorry if I'm giving too little information... one error that sticks out to me is that the recovery mode isn't able to mount the root partition on the drive, and says there's no usable shell in it, too... so I think the system did a self rm -rf /, but the partitions are still showing... and I'm sure the files are still there, I just need a way to get to them again...

Thanks in advance... I hope...

Important info first:
VBOX ver: Oracle VirtualBox 7.2

Host OS: Linux Debian 12 "Bookworm" with GNOME Ver. 43.9 (unsure if GNOME ver. is relevant)

Guest OS: Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4

Guest Additions Installed: Yes

VM Settings:

-RAM allocated: 1024MB

-Storage space: 20GB

-Cores used for VM: 1

-Video Memory allocated: 128MB

-3D Acceleration: No

The error, from /var/log/syslog: 2026-08-11T11:38:31.012120-07:00 192 vboxmanage[171700]: VBoxManage: error: The virtual machine '2K Server' has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1 (0x1)

2026-08-11T11:38:31.032010-07:00 192 vboxmanage[171700]: VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine

Steps I've taken in light of this error: Ran systemctl start vmstartup.service as root with VirtualBox Manager UI open, the error doesn't seem to come back (though running vboxmanage startvm "2K Server" as root throws a different error: VBoxManage: error: Could not find a registered machine named '2K Server'

VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND (0x80bb0001), component VirtualBoxWrap, interface IVirtualBox, callee nsISupports

VBoxManage: error: Context: "FindMachine(Bstr(pszVM).raw(), machine.asOutParam())" at line 907 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp)

What I've gathered from the steps taken: Right now, the system seems to expect the VBOX UI to be open any time I want to start the VM, which is not ideal, given I want this to run TOTALLY independent of the UI, since I won't be attempting access to the system.

Tutorials I've been following (merely as a reference point to execute the steps MY way, which yes, could be VERY inefficient): Creation of SystemD timers, Reference to automation scripting using timers and services (This has actually helped me schedule weekly reboots), Reference to attempting to shut down and start up the VM automatically prior to and after the reboot

The explanation (finally): Greetings and salutations, I come to you with an issue in terms of automation, as explained above. I have created systemd timers to execute services I wrote to hopefully shut down and start up the server VM I selected for the job of hosting Cisco IP Phone services, given I run a phone system on the host system. How I have these services set up is one timer will call for a service to shut the VM down ten minutes before the reboot is even scheduled, then an unrelated timer hits the reboot service every week, and then another timer HOPEFULLY will call a service to start the VM back up, but as seen by the relevant error using exit code 0x1, that's not happening. These timers and services are called "vmshutdown" and "vmstartup" respectively. for easy access to the respective files, BUT, as highlighted from the "What I've gathered" detailed above, it would seem that the system expects the UI to be running first, when I was hosting the phone system on a VM on my Windows machine, it didn't matter, the VM would just start...

I have a theory on how to go about this, but I want to know if there's something else I might be missing. Perhaps you, the reader, might have a clue as to getting the VM to start without needing the UI opened?

Thanks in advance, and apologies if my format here is not efficient or correct. Did the best I could with the info on the side panel, and the page linked. All needed info, such as steps taken and specs should all be on top.

I'll try and keep this short; This system hosts (well, HOSTED...) my FreePBX phone system, some ISP-level network maintenance was carried out while I was at work, and now when I tried to change the phone system's IP back to what it was, the WiFi adapter killed itself (in a sense), no longer showing up or ANYTHING. So now this laptop is COMPLETELY offline, is my only option left to junk the system? Or can this be fixed? I've tried every trick I could find in Google and under the sun, but to no avail. Logs will not be available due to the nature of the system.

For context, right now I keep getting an unending loop of "Firewall rules corrupted" and "Firewall starting", so logs are unavailable in their RAW format, but I will try to give details as best as I can regardless