Reinstallation - apt-cdrom

[Goh Lip]

Steven, this may help ease in reinstallation of your OS, should you need 
to do it. I am putting in a new subject so that it will not confuse you 
with your current boot problems. Other than backing up your home, and I 
understand you have a separate partition now for it, the following will 
help you reinstall your various applications like biblestudy, wine etc. 
without needing to download again.

make a folder called say, Repo in your home.
install dpkg-dev and build-essential
sudo cp /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb /home/Steven/Repo
cd /home/Steven/Repo
sudo dpkg-scanpackages . /dev/null | gzip -9c > Packages.gz

burn a cd of all the items in Repo

sudo apt-cdrom add


Whenever you do any installation, it will probe your cdrom and install 
from there and use these files instead of downloading again unless there 
are newer versions available.

Before you copy files to Repo, it is advisable to
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean

to clear out outdated or older versions of the packages.

Hope this helps; you will find reinstallation a breeze.

Regards,
Goh Lip

ps: as many have stated before, preferable to use aptitude instead 
especially when using ppa like kde4.3 or beta like Karmic.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade