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

Validated on 14 Jul 2022 • Last edited on 18 Mar 2026

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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.

How do I recover access to a Droplet that is at 100% disk usage?

Boot the Droplet from the recovery ISO, then connect using the Recovery Console and delete files to free some disk space.

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.

Why am I getting a Droplet autoscale pool error?

There may be an issue with the autoscale pool or Droplet configuration, the VPC network’s size, or resource limits on the team or datacenter.

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