Clone back system after a crash without touching my data?

[kitabu]

Hi Johannes, Tor and/ or anyone?

I have a huge problem with the Bubba and I don't know how to fix it.

Scenario: 1 disk, 320 GB with faulty Bubba system (blinks forever at startup). Content: 200+ GB of "goodies" (avi, flac, ogg and mp3 files) which took me around 3 months to collect. Everything (DAAP, ftp, etc.) ran beautifully until the recent crash.

Possible soultion 1: to back up all of the content to an Ubuntu server with a 120 GB harddisk, thus bloating much of the data. I do not have a larger harddisk and I do not intend to buy one or bloat any data.

Possible solution 2: try to restore the system on Bubba's 320 GB harddisk by cloning a new bootable copy of Bubba's system, without touching my persoanl data. Before the crash, when everything still worked, I did a network system backup of Bubba's root system on my Ubuntu server.

Possible solution 3: using your rescue image. But then disk will be totally reformatted and my goodies will be lost.

Possible solution 4: using a modified rescue image. I read the string about it and modified the image accordingly. Bubba didn't boot. No go.

I opted for solution number 2 and disassembling the Bubba and installing it's harddisk in the Ubuntu server case. I erased the 'old' Bubba system and cloned the copy from the server harddisk to the Bubba disk using 'rsync -avz'. I reassembled my Bubba and started it. But sadly it did not boot.

My questions are now: have I done this in the right way or am I missing something here? I have read that not the whole Bubba system is located at the harddisk. Could that be of influence to the fact that my clone is unbootable? Could it be an inconsistency in the harddisk itself that prevents it from booting up, even with a freshly cloned system?

Please guide me through . I would love to have my Bubba up and running again, with all of my goodies, of course.

-- Kitabu

[johannes]

Sorry to hear that you have these problems. Do I understand correctly that it may be your disk that has given up, and you don't have anohter large-enough disk to try with? Replacing the disk is of course a warranty issue but I guess that doesn't help you now.

I'd suggest:

1) Try booting with the minimal image (http://update.excito.net/install/minimal/) and see if you can find out what's wrong. Requires some Linux knowledge and/or guidance from someone who knows. Let us know if you need help here.

2) Find/buy/borrow a disk that's large enough to copy out your music, then try restoring your system with a re-install. Disk space is quite cheap now, perhaps it's worth it to save your heavy work?

And of course, should you wan't you disk replaced just let us know, but we can't of course guarantee the old disk contents...