[Voyage-linux] Unable to boot restored image

[Norman Henderson]

Hi, sorry if this is a newbie issue, I've searched without success.

I've been running Voyage 0.6.5 for a year without problems on an Alix
3d3 with a CF card. I have been making backups to an external HDD
using "dd if=/dev/sda1 of={filename}.img bs=1M". A few weeks ago my CF
card started corrupting data and has now died, there is apparently no
recoverable data. I bought a new CF card and desperately want to get
back a running system from my latest backup.

The only other resource I have is a Windows 7 laptop, although I do
have Ubuntu running on it in a VirtualBox VM (and I can also
successfully boot the Voyage LiveCD in that VM). So, I used a tool
"ImDisk" to mount the .img file in Windows, made it visible in
VirtualBox as IDE Primary Master, and made my CF reader/writer visible
as a USB HDD device. So far so good. Using Ubuntu, I was able to fdisk
the CF to create a partition of the same size as before (the physical
device appears to be slightly larger than the old one), marked it
bootable, and used "dd" to restore the image. The parameters reported
by fdisk were exactly the same as the old CF, I could mount it fine in
the VM, and the contents appeared to be complete.

Problem: I then installed the CF in my Alix board and although the
BIOS recognizes it (reports the CF's manufacturer etc.) after POST I
get "disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". I have no
idea what I've missed...

I do recall that when I originally built my system I didn't manage to
create a bootable CF at that time either, working on an external
system. I ended up booting the Alix board from a thumb drive with
Voyage 0.6.5 Live and ran the complete install from there to the CF. I
really don't want to do this again because it would mean losing all
the software and installs that I've done over the past year - and I'm
also now in Africa, restricted to slow / unreliable / expensive
Internet.

Suggestions?

Thanks, Norm Henderson