I have always had partimage disks on hand for my partitions, but now when I really need to restore a partition, I can not find the correct path.

I first formatted my hda1, then I have the partition marked that I want to restore, but then when I go to the next step of entering the path, it does not like what I enter. The documentation I have shows to enter this: "/mnt/name_of_backup"

They must have left something out because this surely does not work for me, then I tried many other combinations until I gave up and went here to the good LinuxQestions forums.

I am not running partimage from a disk, I am using the terminal in Ubuntu 5.10 breeze. Can someone bail-me-out here, this is a computer I use for work from my home and I need to get it up and running soon. I do not want to do a clean install as long as I have these image disks. Hope to hear from someone soon....thanks

Do you know the path to the image file? If you don't, how do you expect anyone here to know? You have to type in the complete path to that file. Just browse around until you find it. If you can browse to where the file is but don't understand how to type in the complete path, post back with enough info so someone can give you some meaningful help.

Do you keep the images on a second partition or second drive?
I'm guessing that you are running from a livecd???
If so, you need to make a folder and mount it.
For example:
mkdir /mnt/images
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/images

In that case, the location of the partimage would be something like...
/mnt/images/my_image.000


Don't forget the .000

Ok, I need to give you more info. I am running partimage from my Ubuntu partition hdb2, the drive I want to restore is hda1. The images themselves are on CD's. so no, I am not running off a liveCD.

I am not good at paths, what some people think is simple, is a big challenge to me......lol

I guess that is why I am here, to find help. If I am still missing some info, just let me know, ok ?

I got it: /media/cdrom0/name_of_file

You have to find the mount point for your cd drive. It should be listed in your /etc/fstab file. If you could copy and paste /etc/fstab here, that would help. The path to the files on the cd are through the cd drive mount point.
I don't have ubuntu installed but it probably has the cd drive(and hard drive) mount points all in a common directory like /media or /mnt. Take a look in there. A typical example would be to have the cd drive mount point be /mnt/cdrom or /media/cdrom. When you navigate to the mount point when a cd is in the drive, you see the contents of the cd. If you have a partimage image file on the cd called "backup" the path you would type in would be:

/mnt/cdrom/backup.000

Partimage adds a trailing ".000" to the first image file which must be included. You mention that image(s) are on "cds". That would imply that the partition image is broken down into more than one file, probably so it could be backed up to cdrs. Then you would have a backup.000, backup.001 and maybe even a backup.002. This is a problem because you have to copy all the backup.00* files to a single directory on your hard drive before partimage will deal with it; partimage will not span different cd media while restoring. If you have enough room just create a directory in your home directory called "partimage" and copy all the backup.00* files there. Then you would type this in partimage for a path:

/home/<insert your username>/partimage/backup.000

You only have to list the ".000" file as long as the other files are in the same directory. Before trying to restore with partimage, you must also unmount hda1 as well. Partimage will not restore to a mounted partition.

kilgoretrout

Thank you for your detailed explanations, I need all the help I can get.

It seems to be going fine, as I speak I am on my 3rd CD being restored to the partition and have not had any errors yet.

I have 8 CD images total. When it gets done with one CD, I have to eject it and then enter a new path for each CD, 1.000, 1.001, 1.002 and so on and so forth.

Is this going to mess up my MBR. I have hda1 WinXP that I am restoring, I have ubuntu on hdb2, and Suse on hdb5. What do you think kilgoretrout ? Any thoughts or advice ?

It shouldn't mess up the mbr. I assume you are dual booting winxp and ubuntu. Ubuntu uses the grub bootlaoder and that should be fine. I'm not sure restoring the 1.00* files one after the other will work as I have never done that. However, if the partition is filling up and not being wiped out with each successive restore then it's probably working OK.

I'm done, and it was sucessful doing it that way. Just thought I would let you know and maybe someone else can benefit from it. Well, you know how that goes, let me put that a different way, "it worked for me"

Just wondering as I haven't saved to cdrom, what method you used to put the images on cdrom. Also, when restoring from the cdrom images, does partimage pause and ask for the next cdrom?

Actually when I created the images, I booted the System Rescue CD and entered "mount /dev/hd** /mnt/hd**/name_of_file, then on that same page, there is a place to select restore to CD, then there is a place to select the size of each CD, in my case I used 650 mb because I always use CD-RW's. Some people don't like using CD-RW's but I use them for just about everything and never have any problems with them.

Yes, you are correct, it pauses after each disk when one is doing the restore. And each time you have to enter a new path because the file name changes. When that first happened, I was watching tv and saw the RED buttons, I thought for sure it was a error message, but it just tells you to put in the next disk.

I'll have to give that a try sometime soon.

Oops, that path I gave in my last post puts the 650 mb files on a partition of your choice. And then from there you burn them to a CD. With Bootit For Dos, you could burn them directly to a CD but not partimage (someone correct me if I am wrong about that)