Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

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Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by 0000ff »

Hello,
I am using LMDE which I recently updated, but after that the whole system was messed up. Luckily, I had saved the whole Linux partition before with "Redo Backup and Recovery", but I don't know if I can just restore it, because Grub might still contain the information of the messed up system. How could I solve this problem?

Anyway, I don't know if "Redo Backup and Recovery" is a good tool to save multiple operating systems (in my case LMDE and Windows 7) that reside on one harddrive. Maybe there are better recommendations?

Another question: How can I generally separate programs and configuration from the operating system, so that a new installation isn't such a daunting task?

Thanks for any help.
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Fornhamfred
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Re: Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by Fornhamfred »

The first question is how did you do the backup? Was it as a complete back up of the disk or did you separate windows from Linux?

Assuming you just did one backup then restoring should just re-instate your machine to how it was prior to the backup.

IMHO Linux should always be installed on three partitions, the system(/), swap and home. In this way if something like this happens then it only the system (/) that would need to be re-installed. Additional programmes that you have added would need to be re-installed as well but all your settings are in the home partition. When dual booting between windows and linux I always have a data partition formatted to NTFS on which I keep all my information. This allows windows and linux to access it as windows does not recognise the linux partitions.

If you are sucessful in reinstalling your backup then I suggest you use luckybackup to backup your home file and I think you should be able to install it to a new home partition, you would how-ever have to point fstab to the new location. I have not tried this but think it would work.

Edit: Found this article which should assist. http://www.howtogeek.com/116742/how-to-create-a-separate-home-partition-after-installing-ubuntu/
0000ff

Re: Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by 0000ff »

Thanks for your answer. I have installed Linux on three partitions: system, swap and home and I have a separate NTFS data partition that can be used by both operating systems.

Unfortunatley, on the backup drive is one backup file for both operating systems, hence I can't restore Linux without restoring Windows. Anyway, it seems that I don't have any other choice here, but for the future I would like to improve that, so that I can restore one OS independently of the other. Which backup tool is most flexible? Maybe Clonezilla?
itsme4401

Re: Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by itsme4401 »

so that I can restore one OS independently of the other. Which backup tool is most flexible? Maybe Clonezilla?
AFAIK Redo is Clonezilla nicvely dreesed up, and.. what is more important, redo can back-up partition by partition, if you order it to do so.
The fourth screenshot from top on this page shows you how-to: [url]http://redobackup.org/[/url]. Admitted, sometimes you have to use a live-distro to repair GRUB, but that's a minor issue.
0000ff

Re: Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by 0000ff »

Thanks. I tried to restore the old partitions with Redo Backup and Restore, but after restart GRUB didn't show a list of all installed OSs, instead there was a message "GRUB loading", but it didn't load :-( Does anyone know how to fix that?
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Fornhamfred
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Re: Restoring messed up system (LMDE)

Post by Fornhamfred »

Follow this thread.

http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/grub-reinstall.htm
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