This may not be the appropriate forum for this topic, so tell me to shove
off if necessary, but I suspect that there are a lot of wizards here to whom
this stuff is old hat ...
I'm trying to devise a way to re-install a linux system if the hard drive is
totally destroyed, and I only have a tar archive on tape and tomsrtbt disk.
Thus far, I have been able to successfully boot with tomsrtbt, format the
HD, create partitions, and restore everything from the tape into the right
place with the right permissions. (I've been experimenting with a HD that
has just / and /boot partitions).
The tricky bit comes about when I try and re-run lilo to make the HD
bootable. I tried the following while in the /mnt/root directory (where I
mounted the root FS)
# lilo -C etc/lilo.conf -r /mnt/root
and lilo kindly informs me that :
Map segment is too big.
and no search engine can give me a reference to what this means.
SO....
I thought I'd try and boot off the emergency boot disk that I'd created;
which looked just peachy, except when we get to the bit in the boot
procedure where the boot procedure runs fsck.ext2, and it then sulks with
the following (long) story:
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2 filesystem
(..omitted..) then the superblock is corrupt, and you might try running
e2fsck with an alternate superblock : e2fsck -b 8193
Well, I tried that, but something is awry, because while fdisk show the
correct partition structure, doing a df returns junk, because /dev/hda1 and
/dev/hda2 show the same number of blocks used and available. Now, I
surmised that this has something to do with the sparse-superblock story,
which is handled differently on tomsrtbt since it has a 2.0.37 kernel, and
on the system I'm trying to restore (RH7), with a 2.2.16 kernel.
SO, I'm a bit lost, and any pointers as to what is wrong would be highly
appreciated.
