Migrating to New OS?

[surfrock66]

So...lemme start with the open statement that I tried to do something idiotic...migrate an LVM system to a RAID system without rebooting. Saw an Arch Linux guide to do it, thought I could handle it, was way over my head. Fortunately...I have the whole hard drive backed up onto another Hard Drive.

My box couldn't handle moving the boot partition, and I effed up the MBR and even though the data migrated, I couldn't get grub to reinstall. I had to reinstall the OS.

I have the whole old OS on a hard drive. Can someone give me some tips for restoring that...without re-installing everything?

Is it possible to just wipe everything except /boot/ and just copy it back over, so long as the linux kernel image is still there?

[radioz]

If you already have all of your data backed up, I think it would be easier (and cleaner) to just re-install the OS from scratch.

Get the system re-installed and then restore your data.

Unless you are really adept with Linux, trying to restore your OS from another drive and get all of the partitions and boot information set up will be a challenge.

Re-installation should be pretty painless by comparison.

[surfrock66]

I have a fresh Fedora 14 install, with the Amahi Repo. Is it as simple as just copying everything but boot over? Not sure how to proceed :/

[radioz]

If you already have the OS and Amahi installed and running, I assume you just need to restore your share data?

Don't copy any of the operating system stuff back over or you risk the chance of corrupting your new clean installation.

Where is your backup drive connected?

Tell us what it is you want to restore.

[surfrock66]

Really the whole thing. My old system's /home/ data was actually on a FreeNAS box nfs mounted with /etc/fstab, so it's mostly configuration stuff in the /var/hda folder I think.

[radioz]

You are talking about restoring your hda and not just another computer aren't you?

I'll assume that is the case. If your hda was not used as a desktop machine, there probably isn't anything in /home that needs to be restored. If it was used as a desktop just copy the /home/<username> directories back to your hda machine.

Are you using greyhole? If not, you can copy your share data back to /var/hda/files. I'm not familiar with greyhole, so I'm not sure what the best way to restore shares is with it.

[surfrock66]

At this point, I'm basically just screwing around. Here's what I'm gonna try (knowing this is an extreme long shot)

Leave /boot and /dev from the fresh isntall.
Restore everythign else from the old drive.
edit /etc/fstab to combine the new and old drive mounting.

Hold Onto My Butt.

[surfrock66]

Gnome didn't like that at all. I do use this system as a desktop...prolly outdated bootloader.