I got an root server on the net hosting an important website and am doing backups on a daily base using Tartarus ( http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Tartarus_Backup-Konfiguration ). But as we all know: Backups are only worth a penny if they really work and are usable after an crash. Therefor I did try to recover the "dead called" machine onto BareMetal - or at least BareAir - as it was an VMWare Machine I used.

PreWork:
- Creating VMware Machine with same background and partition structure
( 40 GB HDD: Swap, Root, Boot Partition )
- Install Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS

Recovery:
- Boot with Linux Live CD
- mount /dev/sda2 (my Root Partition)
- Recover Tartarus Backup curl ftp://USER:PASS@YOURSERVER/home-20080411-1349.tar.bz2 | tar xpvj -C /mnt/restore
- mount /dev/sda1 (my Grub Partition) and maybe recover Tartarus Backup of the Partition (most likely that should be do more harm than good... so... maybe leave it 😉 )
- Check UUID of the Partitions with blkid
- Change blkid within /etc/fstab
- Reboot

Done... or most likely 😉

PS: Maybe you will need to remove /etc/udev/rules.d/70-net-persistent and reboot because of the broken Ethernet Card...