[PLUG] HELP! Broken Ubuntu! Can't login!

[Elliott Mitchell]

>From: "John Jordan" <johnxj at comcast.net>
> I think that the best solution right now is to use that Dump archive 
> file to restore. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do that. I 
> googled and found some instructions for Dump/Restore, but they 
> were written in Geekian. I understood one or two words per 
> sentence, usually things like "the" and "an." :(

Though imperfect, the man page for restore is quite useful. Comes down
to two steps:

First, prepare the restore target. `mkfs` as mentioned previously. For a
regular filesystem you might want to use -j, and get ext3's journaling
capability. Likely your disk is /dev/hda1.

Second, do the restore. Mount the filesystem (`mkdir /mnt/target; mount
-t ext2/3 /dev/hda1 /mnt/target` will do). Then go into that directory
and run restore, `restore -r -f <archive>`. If you used -M during dump
you'll use it here too. -j -z and -B will be figured by restore from the
archive. Do the level 0/full first, followed by incrementals in
increasing order (I doubt you've got incrementals, so don't worry about
this). Once this is done you'll have a complete image of what you had
before. At this point remove the file "restoresymtab", this is a leftover
from how restore works. You're done, you can unmount the filesystem, or
proceed to other things.

You'll need a third step though, restoration of the boot loader. Alas I
haven't done this for GRUB. I'm unsure whether Ubuntu's setup will allow
it, but it may be possible to reboot with the live CD in the drive. It
may find your restored filesystem, and boot your system the way it was;
in this case it might be as simple as running `grub` at a root shell.


Note for the elders. The Linux dump is a SysV-style, rather than the
ancient awful BSD-style dump. SysV-style restores via the normal API,
rather than directly accessing the target filesystem via block device.
This has advantages of not needing the target to be identical in every
way (notably size), in fact you can restore onto a completely different
type of filesystem.


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