Recovery methods?

[Skooter]

My recent system crashes due to bad drivers have left me scratching my head. Ubuntu does not seem to have any decent recovery utilities from what I can tell. The one in boot-up is a total joke and doesn't work at all. Had to reinstall the OS in the end.

I find this hard to believe... am I missing something? How do you go about fixing a broken system without reinstalling? I don't see sort of roll-back or system checkpoint or anything like that... and the lack of error messages make troubleshooting really hard... so what's the method here?

[oz]

I usually just use imaging software to make images of my partitions then restore from those images when needed. It's been working quite well for me for about the last 5 or 6 years.

[Skooter]

Do you have a link for instructions on doing that?

[oz]

I run Acronis TrueImage directly from the liveCD:

Complete hard disk recovery solution, backup, drive copy, clone and image computer software

It's the same copy that I've been using for years, and it works with Linux just fine when run from the CD. It is menu driven, so no external instructions are really necessary.

Other imaging software options can be found here:

Drive Imaging | Linux App Finder

Note that it's usually best to install software directly from your distribution repositories whenever possible, rather than installing from source.

[Skooter]

Especially since I have no idea how to compile things from source...

Thanks, that looks to be just what I was looking for.

[Jonathan183]

When I have *fixed my system until it breaks* I usually boot from a live CD and chroot into the system. If I can I fix things that way ... if not I reinstall. I keep user data and home areas on separate partitions from root so data and settings are not lost during the reinstall. I backup the data partitions using a clonezilla live CD.

Log files can give a reasonable clue what the problem is ... but I'm still learning how to use them . As long as I have the user data backup I can live with a re-install ...

I have started using backintime to reduce the number of times I backup user data like e-mails, and save the data to a separate partition (... probably start doing this to a separate disk now I have 2 ).

[Skooter]

I don't have any room for another partition though... I messed up and gave windows to much space, i don't know how to fix that... I heard about s progrsm HUbackup the other day. Is it any good? It sounds like its an Archiver...

[oz]

I don't have any room for another partition though... I messed up and gave windows to much space, i don't know how to fix that...

If you aren't comfortable using fdisk from the command line, you can adjust your partitions using the Parted Magic LiveCD. It has a GUI interface and is quite easy to understand, and use.

[klokh]

The ubuntu cd itself has Gparted, but you must defragment your Windows system and backup before resizing.
There's a live distro specially for recover, with Gparted, Partimage, Testdisk and other more technical tools. RIPLinux (google it, I can't post url's)

[Jonathan183]

Links are in downloads section of the forums