boot issues after restoring a backup

[scar]

so i've just done a basic/netinst of ubuntu 12.04 and that is at least
booting up fine... so now i am going to boot to a liveCD and try to do a
sort of bare-metal restore of my backup... basically restore all of my
root partition except for /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab (and /boot too
since it is a different partition and already has the 12.04 kernels
installed).  if there are any other files i should leave out please let
me know--i need to get the system running ASAP