On Wed, 3 Dec 2025 07:13:55 +1100
terryc <terryc@???> wrote:

> Due to a few recent boxen failures, I need to repair my mailer, which
> has to be carried out by the old sneaker-net to move required packages
> onto a cloned mailer. Hence my request in the subject.
>
> The back story is I cloned my mailer running on spining rust to a nvme
> just under a year ago as a backup/recovery method, but my cloning method
> was insufficient for a smooth boot up and now I need to
> repair it. The boot up is missing the bit that creates all those
> 'recent' systems like /proc /sys and others(?).
>
> ~20 years of just installing Debian/Devuan ontonewish hardware means
> I've forgotten all that knowledge of patching systems to tweak a bit
> more life out of them. Also, the nvme contains the only copy of the
> knowledge of aliases and access files for sendmail.
>
> Either my web-fu is also badly shot now, but the urls from search
> engines are trash and if this is the "knowledge" that AI engines are
> built on, all is explained.
>
> TIA.
> terryc
Hi.
what I would do absolutely untested:

1) create a clone (with dd ?) of the nvme to another disk for experimenting
2) boot the system with the devuan/debian live cd or installer
3) open a shell
4) mount the nvme to a directory e.g.  /mnt
5) bind mount /proc to /mnt/proc, /sys to /mnt/sys, /dev to /mnt/dev (did I forget some?)
6) as root chroot /mnt/
6bis) make a copy of /mnt/etc just in case some conf file gets clobbered in the recover process
7) set up networking would help
8) run: dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 > list.txt   to create a list of installed packages
9) run: for i in $(cat list.txt) ; do apt install --reinstall $i; done
     (or if no network use the list to download all packages and run
      for i in $(cat list.txt) ; do apt install --reinstall ./$i; done)
10) re-run grub-install /dev/???
10) re-run update-grub
11) re-run update-initramfs -u -k all
12) exit chroot and cd /
13) umount /mnt/proc, /mnt/sys, /mnt/dev, /mnt   
14) reboot and remove livecd 
15) hope for the best, if it works redo on nvme or clone to nvme

Now I hope the list members will tell you why this is a very bad idea
or which super-obvious step I have overlooked or forgotten.

Ciao,
Tito