I recently backed up and restored my SuSE 10 install on my laptop using rsync:

rsync -av / server:/Backup/mylaptop

So my entire system was copied to '/Backup/mylaptop' on my file server.

I then repartitioned my disks (using Knoppix) and rsync'd everything back to /dev/hda1. Redid grub so it pointed to the right partition.

So - it boots and everything works just like it used to EXCEPT for some strange things.

The most obvious thing is bootsplash.. I don't have one anymore, no matter what I do with mkinitrd, splash=silent, setting vga modes, etc. There is no /proc/splash file - it never gets created. No error messages indicate why.

Now - I don't care about a bootsplash screen - but it has bugged me for 4 weeks why it won't work and I play around with it daily.

Today - one thought I had was that doing my rsync of everything - I copied things like /proc and /sys .. So there are files on disk even though these are directories Linux builds in memory. I tried erasing the contents of these directories (booted from Knoppix again to do it) on disk. No difference.. I was thinking maybe there was confusion being caused there -- but darn.

Anyway, I'm not a newbie - and I've run down just about every suggestion to fix bootsplash and nothing works. I thought maybe the added twist of having restored my system from an rsync backup might be a clue that would give someone the 'ahas' ;-)

Thanks for any suggestions!

I never like doing a full system backup up of a live system if I can help it and I never use rsync to do a full system backup. If you did not execute rsync with root privileges some files may not have been copied over. Some files are only readable by root, i.e. other users are not given read privileges on the file. If that's the case rsync(or tar or other backup commands) will not copy the file if it doesn't have read access.

I did have root authority.. but you're right - I would have been better off doing the rsync backup from Knoppix (as I did the restore) instead of a live system.

Like kilgoretrout said, I don't like backups of a live system. But none-the-less, one of the last things I would figure to get screwed up during a live backup would be something that rarely changes - like a splash screen. I would have predicted that a splash screen would come through unscathed and something like a busy database might catch heck during a live backup. Your splash screen is probably so static that it has never been changed since you installed the OS. Weird that this would the thing that gets nuked.