[Voyage-linux] Re: Unable to boot restored image

[Norman Henderson]

Thanks very much for the quick response! I won't bore you with the
rest of my difficulties, enough to say that was the key thing I missed
and I've got my Alix/Voyage system working again now with the new CF
card.

- Norm Henderson

On 2011-07-09, Norman Henderson <norm.audrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>