Minor disaster recovery

[Tyson Sawyer]

Guys,

Thanks for the help.  I wasn't able to go shopping today so rebuild is
going to take a little longer than I had hoped.  Too bad I have a day
job.

Thanks for the suggestions for dd'ing the existing drive.  If I go
with a fresh Ubuntu install, I shouldn't need it as I expect that I
have a good backup.  As I said in the original post, we have BackupPC
running to an external drive.  It runs daily.

I've been getting around to updating my data drives to a RAID
configuration, but now I'm putting a priority on the main system drive
also after considering your comments.  ...not a novel idea, but the
comments bring focus onto good points.

I realize that recovery from the failing disk could result in some
corrupt files, that is why that method included a restore from the
backup once the system was running.  The motivation for starting from
the image of the failing drive is that it is exactly the same OS
version as the backup I'd be restoring from.  I have no idea how to
get exactly the same version of Ubuntu from a fresh install.

However, the system drive contains very little custom data.  I suspect
I'll be best off just doing a fresh, clean install and then digging
config files out of the backup.

Cheers!
Ty

-- 
Tyson D Sawyer

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent
of many bad measures.   - Daniel Webster