I backed up my disks the other day - thankfully as something went wrong today. Now I am trying to restore (part of) the backup.

This paragraph is optional: The something that went wrong is that my root partition (512Mb) got full some how, preventing me from finishing a downgrade that is necessary to get my X server working again (an upgrade was incompatible with my gpu). The problem is either that I installed a lot more stuff that I intended to on to /, or more likely, a weird situation that arose as a result of these installations, whereby I now have a couple of files occupying about half the partition. I cant remember their name exactly, but its somethting like /sys/devices/pci000/0000:000:01.1/resource1 ... or something. The thing is, these arent real files are they? And I cant mv or rm them (i/o error). Sigh. So Im stuck.

Anyways, I decided, after taking another backup of the now useless partition, that I would restore it from the / backup of two days ago. So I simply did rm -r * on the root partition and rsyncd the contents of the backup into place on the now empty partition (this was all done using a live cd).

I had hoped it would be that simple, but now I cant boot. I get a kernel panic (cant read the full message cos it powers off too quickly).

What can I do to restore my backup and get running again?

Thanks!

A lot of questions here. Specifically, how did you do the original rsync backup? Did you do the backup as root? Did you backup to a native linux filesystem or FAT32? Did you do the backup from a livecd or from a running system? You say you are restoring "part" of your backup and get a kernel panic. Exactly which part are you attempting to restore?

I used a live cd. I mounted my disks and the external disk and ran

# rsync -Sav --numeric-ids <src> <dest>

for each of my partitions. I did this as root. I attempted to restore by swapping src and dest.

All my partitions are reiserfs (except /boot which is ext3). I formatted my external disk as ext3.

When I say "part", I mean I am only trying to restore my 512Mb / partition (not /home, /user, /opt, etc.) ... I wonder if I damaged the link to /boot or something. Will look into that.

I must have had an extra / or something. The restore out everything in a subfolder of /. Problem solved now. Sorry/Thanks.