System recovery woes

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 5 November 2011 23:48, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> It is not clear to me what you are trying to restore, you say you have
> a fresh install of 11.04 but say you are having trouble with grub.
> Does the fresh install not work correctly?  What are you trying to
> restore on sda7?
>
> Colin

I have two partitions with OS-en on them.  A fresh install that seems
fine, and a partition where I'm trying to restore and boot a backup,
but having trouble.  The fresh install has been necessary in order to
run some of the grub tools, and to validate that the hardware is
functioning.

This has now been going on long enough that I'm considering running
the fresh install and moving over my configuration from the backup
manually.  I'm really not liking that option because of how heavily
configured the system was.  Besides, now seems like a sensible time to
find out if I have to change my backup techniques in some way.  Right
now they are tars of each mount point, ntfsclones of ntfs partitions,
dd's of other non-linux partitions, and text files of the outputs of
fdisk, df and blkid.

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD