As I stated in this thread (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ed-4175506695/) I had trouble booting my Sabayon Linux after all the installed kernel versions were upgraded by the package manager.

I tried to compile a kernel via a Gentoo Live system and then have GRUB boot it, but failed due to my limited knowledge of Linux.

So finally I decided to reinstall my system, and surprisingly the newest 3.14.4 kernel revision actually boots.

In order to prevent such catastrophes in the future, I would like make a backup of my working kernel versions, so I can 'copy' them back. How would I best do that? Making a backup of my Boot-partition probably won't be enough.

Thanks for your hints

Making a copy of your /boot directory and its sub directories will be sufficient.

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Steve Stites

I would very much doubt that. I haven't looked at Sabayon since it was initally launched, but I can't believe they'd do that.
The (proprietary) firmware is maintained out-of-tree and loaded separately. I'd suspect your kernel(s) actually booted ok, but you wound up with a broken system - so the effect may have looked the same to you.To preclude events like this I take a snapshot of the entire system pror to updates. If all goes well, just trash the snap, if not roll-back.
I use btrfs, but LVM2 offers similar capabilities.

...after all the installed kernel versions were upgraded by the package manager.


They do minor upgrades like from 3.14.1 to 3.14.2. Still all these 'revisions' apparently had modifications so that neither of them booted my system. I had all kernels installed from 3.9 all through to 3.14 and all received a revision upgrade.

Not being able to boot the system gave me no chance to reinstall and old kernel saved on the system. And I failed to have a manually compiled kernel boot (encrypted LVM doesn't make things easier).