Today, I encountered a critical issue during a software update on my DGX Spark that resulted in a complete system failure. The only recovery option available was a full restore, which wiped all user data, even though I had good backups and a well-managed environment in place. I have now spent over …

I know it is a bit of a wild idea but if you use something for production it is probably a good practice to make regular backups.

Ummm.. how you work is up to you, if you are keeping user data on your system drive AND expecting resilience where it doesnt exist then that is a problem for you to solve, not NVIDIAs. The DGX GB10 is not on its own a resilient redundant system, that comes down to infrastructure design which the en…

I think some of the thinking around this topic is about 20 years out of date. We already have exactly this kind of functionality on macOS and have for a very long time: a separate recovery partition, the ability to reinstall or repair the OS without touching user data, and simple, robust paths to r…

It is all possible, you can shrink your main partition, dd the reocvery ISO to the free space in a new partition, add a grub option to boot from the ISO partition. Pretty much done. What you arr saying is you didnt do that and expect NVIDIA to have done it for you I guess. If your data was importan…

Probably you can get some useful information from this topic. [image] Recovery from kernel panic after dashboard update — unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) DGX Spark / GB10 My Spark went unbootable after a routine “Update Now” through the DGX Dashb…

That would be nice for many users, so there is nothing wrong with asking for it. And it would be nice if NVIDIA made that an option for that user segment; however, I do need to point out that I think the premise is wrong… [image] griffith.mark: This is a very basic expectation for a premium, “a…

Also, unfortunately for many of us, we have a couple of terabytes hanging around in $HOME/.cache/huggingface. Theres a bit of a problem finding a place yo put that when you do a full re-image 😂😂

Strawman proposal (AI‑assisted, needs expert review): Modern DGX Spark recovery with data‑preserving options First, thank you to everyone who has shared detailed recovery steps, especially the kernel‑panic writeup with the missing initramfs and GRUB timeout issues. That kind of deep, hands‑on docum…

@griffith.mark it might surprise you, but when issues arrive the Spark can be booted with a live USB distro, Ubuntu preferably, mount the NVMe and recover your data before wiping it with FastOS (the recovery method supplied by NVIDIA)

These are certainly constructive points where improvements could be made. Im not however sure how much of the community would be interested, certainly the quadrant which you come from (MacOS) might be, but the Linux side will already have been dealing with these kind of issues on other systems and a…

Request: DGX Spark OS Recovery Without Wiping User Data

Accelerated Computing DGX Spark / GB10 User Forum DGX Spark / GB10

door.blu May 22, 2026, 6:34pm 6

Probably you can get some useful information from this topic.

As you can see some standard Ubuntu arm64 live iso + hands can make you happy without wiping.

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Request: DGX Spark OS Recovery Without Wiping User Data

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