An experiment in backup

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 3:54 AM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > I have a tar backup of the entire system, excluding /sys, /proc and /dev.
> > I have a tar backup of a bind-mount of /dev.
> > These were taken while the system was running, but quiet. I did it this
> > way because I cannot get the system to boot into single user mode.
> Putting
> > "single" on the end of the "linux" like results in a black screen.
> >
> > I restored these, created /sys and /proc, and tried to boot the resulting
> > partition. It boots, but X does not come up, or even seem to try. I can
> do
> > a console login to my usual account, and stuff is there.
>
> What commands did you run to back up and restore the system?
>
> For the Linux part (there's also Windows on some of my machines) it's all
tar.


> Is '/tmp' a tmpfs filesystem? If not, did you back up and restore it?
>

It's a subdirectory of /, not a mount point on the machine in question.

>
> Did you exclude '/run'? If not, did you restore it?
>
I exclude /var/run and /var/lock

>
> Did you create '/proc' and '/sys' with the right ownership and mode?
>
> Hmm.  They appear right. 755 owned by root.


> If this is a Debian system, is it a non-standard install that doesn't
> use udev (AFAIK this is still possible)? If not, there's no point in
> backing up and restoring '/dev'.
>
> It's vanilla Xubuntu.  I back up and restore what's on the hard drive via
a bind mount.
I wasn't convinced there wasn't something in the boot process that needed
it.


> If this is an Ubuntu system, the default '(recovery)' grub entry will
> have 'nomodeset' appended. Try that when you add 'single'.
>
> Are you using a DM?

 A what? Xubuntu uses xfce4 if that answers the question.

Are you using a WM or a DE?
>
A what?

>
> Have you looked at the logs? Especially Xorg.0.log and xsessions-errors.
>
Xorg logs seem normal
I don't see any xsessions-errors file


> Can you launch X after logging in to the console?
>

I don't know how.

>
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>


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman
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