System recovery woes

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I'll try to keep this short, but the temptation is to tell the whole
story of the last 2 weeks.  I'll spare you that.

My 9-year-old main machine -- DNS, web and mail server plus main home
desktop -- died a slightly lingering death.  I was able to get
backups, I think, mostly as tar files.  Thank the gods of progress for
2 terrabyte drives.

I have a new mainboard and all new controllers.  Now I need to
restore.  Putting data back on disk is not a problem, but getting it
to boot is surprisingly hard.  This is where I could use some help.
The system was Natty, and that's how I'm trying to restore it.

I've been following instructions from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair with no luck.  it's even
made the system unbootable sometimes.  It refuses to do the advanced
stuff (screen shots on the web page) from a hard disk, but then from a
fresh live CD it won't enable them.  Grrrr.

I've been following instructions from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling_GRUB2, which
includes quite a number of methods.  I'm working my way through, but
I'm not done yet.  I find to my surprise that "grub-install" does not
build a grub.cfg, and grub-mkconfig (the guts of update-grub) refuses
to run from my live disk because the mount point of the root directory
("aufs") confuses it.

So far, I've been working with a fresh install of 11.04 on /dev/sda4,
and the restored partition on /dev/sda7.  I still have things to try,
but I thought I'd mention what seems to be problems with the state of
the recovery tools, and hope for some sage advice.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD