I am not sure if this question was asked before, searched for this question in different possible combinations in google and couldn't find an answer. I am hoping find an answer in this forum.

The problem I have,
I had a partition of size 3068252x1k (/dev/hda1 - reiserfs), used the following command to back up this partition,
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=linux_reiser.file bs=1k count=3068252

burned this linux_reiser.file into a dvd using dvdrecord,
dvdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -driveropts=burnfree -eject linux_resier.file

Now, I had to delete all the partitions and on my first Trial to restore, here is what I did,
reboot the system with a slackware cd and tried this command,
using fdisk create a partition of size 2996 MB = 3068252x1KB.
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda1 bs=1k count=3068252

I get a message that no space is left in /dev/hda1. I increased the partition size by 1 cylinder each time and tried it until the dd command could successfully write all the bytes. However I see that the partition is not restored, as I cannot boot from this disk. This partition is marked as bootable.

Thanks in advance.

Next time try using partimage:

http://www.partimage.org/

Download the SystemRescue CD iso and you can run partimage from that; it's similar to ghost but has support for all common linux filesystems.


As to your current problem, are you sure the data is not on your new partition. Try booting off a knoppix cd and see what's there. Even though you may have successfully imaged the partition, you did not image the mbr with that command which is where the boot loader is located which might be your problem. without a bootloader, you can't boot the system. There's some tricks you can try to restore the bootloader but you'll need a live cd like knoppix to do any of them assuming you successfully restored the original partition.