How can I regain access to my Droplet when it won't boot?

If your Droplet fails to boot, you can boot it into the recovery ISO to regain access to the Droplet.

How to Recover Data from Droplets with the Recovery ISO

Use DigitalOcean’s recovery ISO with the Recovery Console to regain access to and perform data recovery operations on your Droplet, like getting access to an interactive shell, running fsck, or chrooting into the system.

The recovery ISO loads a limited amount of basic features on your Droplet and can help you regain command line access to your files. Once you’ve booted into recovery mode, you can begin to troubleshoot your Droplet’s ability to boot up normally.

Related Topics

Why is my Droplet booting in Read Only mode?

File system corruption can cause a Droplet to boot into read only mode.

How do I reset my Droplet's root password?

You can reset your Droplet’s password using the control panel or the recovery ISO.

How do I fix a "system not initialized" error on multi-GPU Droplets?

Make sure NVIDIA Fabric Manager is running and has the same version number as the GPU drivers.