Hi there,

Centos4.4

I have one machine died recently and I am trying to recover it on another one. I have dump files which I used to backup partitions.

So what I did is

- Installed new system, partitioned and installed CentOS4.4 on it. Partition layout is same but partition sizes are little bit different since hard drive is bigger on new machine.


- I used Knoppix to boot on new machine. It automatically mounts partitions under /media/hda_something.

- Connected to dump file and restored all old server data one by one to new machine.

Now when I boot I got this screen

GRUB

.. and that's it.

I installed GRUB initially in MBR. So it seems like it's not there or ... ??
Did I screwed something when I recovered /boot partition? I am not sure if /boot partition contains MBR or not? Did I overwrite MBR?


Thanks for all replies!!

I assume your using dd for these dumps? In my opinion that's just a really bad way to do backups. I think what your trying to do is a bare metal restore, you should really be saving your time and backup files and applications only, not the whole partition with a dd image. When a system goes down, you install the base OS, then restore the files and applications that were not native with it.

You probably did overwrite important info in the MBR. You should not have to recover the /boot partition unless you're using newer kernels or recompiled from backups most likely.

What partition scheme do you have and which ones did you specifically dump and restore?

He may also be using the dump program proper, which is a much smarter way of doing back-ups. In this case, since the disks are different sizes a bare-metal restore is unwise. GRUB records the location on the disk of the stage1_5 and stage_2 binaries which are stored on /boot and when OP recovered them, their locations obviously changed and GRUB was no longer able to boot. In general, restoring system stuff like /boot is a bad idea. The only thing that should be backed up is user data and applications not installed from RPM or ones that have been customized. Then an interactive restore can be done (see the restore man page for details).

I did use dump ... and yes I did overwrite /boot. I listened to your advice and this time restored just applications I cannot install with rpm and it works fine.

Thanks for your time guys ... it did help me a lot.