New Primary HDD: A full Ubuntu backup & restoration experience (Draft)

Steps:

1. Use "SystemRescueCD"
2. "fsarchiver savefs"
3. "fsarchiver restfs"
4. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
   mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot  #skip this if don't have a separate /boot partition
   grub2-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda

Operation Stats:

• Original Disk Space used on the HDD to backup: 45 GB
• Size of the backup images using "fsarchiver" default settings: 30 GB
• Time taken to restore the whole HDD: around 45 min.
• Bootloader restoration (grub2): 1 min.

Impression: Very fast, very little disk space used, very happy :)

Restore GRUB

1. Boot from a Live CD (any Linux distribution, doesn't matter)
2. Open a terminal window
3. Type "grub"
4. Type "root (hd0,6)", or whatever your harddisk + boot partition numbers are (pressing tab on the keyboard will auto-complete for you)
5. Type "setup (hd0)"
6. Quit grub by typing "quit".
7. Reboot.