I put my efika to sleep after working on it for an hour or two, by shutting the lid while logged into the maverick gnome desktop, which usually works, or so it seems. When I tried using it again, the light was off. I tried turning it on, but it's bricked. It seems to reach the boot loader, as the external sd card light blinks when I turn it on. But nothing ever appears on screen. I tried removing the battery, plugging it in, etc., same symptoms as when it was bricked by the bad maverick image.
I am tempted to reboot into said maverick installation image, except that I had a few days of work on it that haven't been pushed to my main servers. Is there a rescue image instead, that I could use to salvage my files before I either reinstall the machine or try to fix the installation?
OK, so I mounted the maverick install partition, commented out the /home/oem/install line from /etc/rc.local and booted on the SSD, and could login just fine with oem / oem.
The partition table on /dev/sda was somehow hosed. I re-created it by extracting and running the relevant parts of the install script (those that use parted), and it now works fine again. I'm a bit scared that some stray process is hosing my partition table (and who knows what else), and will be more proactively backing up data.