Hello all,
I have been using a small script to perform a backup of my entire system every week for a few years, to a RAID5 Array of 10 SCSI drives.
I have never had any need to restore my system from my Backup, and I could use some advise and/or assistance.

The OS involved is CentOS 5.2 x86 (32bit).

My Backup Script :

#!/bin/bash
SRCD="/"
TGTD="/media/MOM-3/MOM-3_Backups/"
OF=MOM-3_BU-Full-$(date +%m%d%Y).tgz
tar cvpzf $TGTD$OF --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/media --exclude=/sys $SRCD
## $TGTD$OF $SRCD

I have had an unrecoverable disk failure, and find I shall have to restore the entire system to a new drive.

I do have both the CentOS "Install" and "Live CD" to use if needed.
My atempts to find the answer as to the proper method to use for restoring this to a new drive; ie... can I use this method to restore a new "bare metal" drive, or does the drive need more preparation prior to the restoration (some sort of install of CentOS, etc...). My attempts to use the OS's Archive Manager to restore the BU to a drive have not been successful. I do not have the background/experience to feel comfortable wiht this restoration without the guidance of someone more Experienced/Knowledge than myself.

I have tried to figure this out for myself, but my attempts have not been successful....

TIA....

TexasMike




Any assistance or advice will be most appreciated.

All this script did was make a TAR file of the entire filesystem (minus a few things), it's not really the kind of thing you can just image to a bare drive and get a workable system.

You'll still need to manually partition and format the drives, and those partitions will need to more or less match what was done previously so things like fstab will work properly. You'll also need to install a bootloader to the drive's MBR.

After that, you should be able to simply extract one of the .tgz files into the blank drive, and hope for the best. Since the archive was made of a running system, there is a fairly good chance there will be a few glitches, but it will probably boot.

You could try http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mondo.html for a tool that does that for you.