Beginners • Noob error: I fear I may have bricked my Pi5

Hi all, first time poster here hoping for some help

I'm running a Pi5 and have been using abcde to rip CDs to an external hard drive. The files get ripped to the root directory, I then copy them over to my hard drive, and then run to delete the folder from my Home dir.

All good so far.

However, one of the CDs I was ripping had a rather long name which started with the $ character (for the sake of this discussion, let's called it $ummer_in_Bloom). When I came to delete this folder from the Home dir, I ran the following command to save me having to type the whole thing (I'd done this previously with other dirs) It was then that I noticed a lot of activity in the command line, and it seemed as if it was trying to delete some core dirs/files. I quickly pressed CTRL+C to cancel the command, but immediately noticed things had gone a bit wrong (taskbar had moved to the top of the screen, there were no programs in the Launcher menu). I tried to power down from the Launcher, but got an error that the program to power down could not be found.

I did hard power off via the physical button on the Pi. Have tried to boot it up again but just see the attached screen.
I'm guessing the $ character in the command was the culprit. Have I bricked it? Is it beyond repair?

Thanks in advance for any help

Statistics: Posted by HalveMaen — Fri Jan 16, 2026 2:51 pm — Replies 2 — Views 58

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