Greg Wallace wrote:
I was attempting to tweak a typical Windows/Linux setup and completely trashed the disk. In retrospect, it was a pretty poor setup to begin with. I already have a Windows machine (from which I'm writing this note), so why would I want Windows on my other machine? Simply because I was so new and green when I first set it up that I didn't know any better.
Here's what I had -
Windows - 40 GB Swap - 1 GB Linux - 39 GB
Here's what I have now -
Swap - 3 GB Linux - 40 GB Free for the future - 37 GB
Now to my dilemma. I had to install a bare minimum system to get the above set up. Now I want to recover my original system which has a fully functional Oracle Enterprise 9.2.0.5.0 on it (yes, I'd sort of like to have that all back). I have the full backup of my old system on a usb disk drive. I have never worked with setting up a usb connection on Linux. This device currently is fully formatted in NTFS. My plan is to re-format it and give half of the space to Windows (NTFS) and the other half to Linux (FAT3). I can then put my full backup on that device and plug it into my Linux machine. I would think this would be a good way to get the data back into my new Linux system. The restore I did contained everything. Hard disk system areas, all mounted devices at that time, etc. In other words, I backed up MY ENTIRE SYSTEM. If I get that USB device on-line, would I be good to go to do a full Linux restore?
Thanks and yours truly, Greg Wallace
Unfortunately, it will probably not be as easy as copying files over and rebooting. For starters, you have changed the drive layout and will most likely not be able to use the backed up fstab. If partitions have change you may also need to keep your current grub config. You say you have a full backup on a USB disk. You also say the disk is NTFS. I'm going to assume you were not writing to NTFS from Linux and your backups are actually on the other PC. If the files were backed up to tgz or some format that maintained permissions, most of the system could be restored easily. If the files were just copied to the other system ... well ... that's a whole new ballgame. Where exactly are the backup files and what format are they in? Louis