Getting a working base system

I'm just settling into Ark Linux in the hopes that I can contribute a 
little, I've made previous attempts to run the distribution but this is 
the first time I've really gotten this far.

I got it installed and found out how to get a lot of things working, 
with help of course (thanks Bero :-) ) , anyway I tried to get some 
updates over Kynaptic at first I wound up with an extra kernel that 
wouldn't boot with full hardware support, the second time I wound up 
with all my non-windows grub entries disappearing so I'm effectively 
locked out. Does anyone know how I can get back in and restore the Grub 
entries for Ark?

Btw. I know I complain about this a lot (in the regular Ark Linux list) 
but the packaging system seems a little messed up, last time I 
successfully booted into Ark I was unable to install any of the 
development packages because of a lot of dependencies which were off by 
a simple release number and not anything significant like a version 
number. Should I assume that upon installing Ark I should avoid updating 
until some sort of announcement is made indicating that its safe? It 
seems unlikely to me that others are contributing to Ark while 
experiencing the same problems I'm having so there must be something 
everyone here knows that I don't.

I was unable to get my DVD-RW and CD-RW drives working in Ark, I don't 
think they are properly detected since I manually edited the /etc/fstab 
file and was still unable to get them to work. I am fairly familiar with 
how to do this from Slackware and a couple of other distributions but 
Ark didn't even know the drives were present when I tried to eject 
/dev/hdb (DVD-RW) or /dev/hdd (CD-RW).

I'd rather have both my CD drives working but if I could get just one to 
work that in itself would be great, first however, I still need to find 
out how to get back into Ark and recreate the Grub entries for it, once 
I have everything working well enough and I am familiar with the 
distribution I hope to start contributing in whatever way I'm best at.

Thanks.

-- 
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