Recovery

01

13 min read

Kernel panic on a Debian NAS: recovering a truncated libc without rebooting into the void

A Debian 13 NAS that won't boot: immediate kernel panic on the first userspace exec, with libc.so.6 turned into "ISO-8859 text" instead of ELF. Diagnosis through debugfs, recovery from a live USB with the apt↔libc chicken-and-egg trap, and the APT guardrails to put in place so it never happens again.