Interesting recovery frustrations

[Nils Kassube]

MR ZenWiz wrote:
> For reasons I shan't go into here, I saved my Maverick /boot and /
> into spare partitions I have set aside for just this sort of thing
> and installed RHEL 5.4 on my workstation.  I battled with it for
> about a day and decided to go back to Maverick this morning.

Next time better make your test installation in a virtual machine.

> I figured it would be a fairly simple task - restore the /home user
> I'd previously saved (no problem there), then boot from the live CD
> and restore the boot and root partitions, then grub-install and sail
> away.

[snipped lengthy story of restore troubles]

> Comments?  Thoughts?  Please skip any "don't do that" or "stick with
> Lucid" kinds of "I told you so"s - not needed.

Well, the "I told you so"s wouldn't be valid - or did you ask the list 
for advice before you started the adventure? :)

> I'm looking more for
> a better way to preserve and recover in the future should I need
> (NOT want) to boot a different OS from the hardware again.

Whenever I make a test installation and may want to return to the exact 
previous state, I always make an image of the relevant partitions or 
entire disks (using dd). And I only make test installations outside of a 
VM if I want to test hardware related things.


Nils