Are you saying you took a copy of the partition using something like dd
if=/dev/sdXy of=/mnt/removeable-media/a-file-on this-media or did you
just copy the files?
Thanks for your interesting suggestions; however, they reflect a considerable
knowledge. In my case, I'm using a proprietary imaging software based on the
Linux kernel that offers images made of one's whole hard drive or by way of an
options menu, a list of individual partitions.
My 'working system' is on one partition, sda1 and I've made a backup copy of
this partition that is compressed into an 8GB kingston USB stick. I had this
notion that after the hard drive was reformatted with ext4 I could boot up with
the .iso Linux image that comes with the proprietary software and rebuild the
partition by using the above backup.
I've had to use this on a few occasions to rebuild my 'working system' after
certain sid dist-upgrades were performed.
I'm happy to report this doesn't happen as much now as in the recent past.
My question was since this backup is on an ext3 formatted USB stick, if my hard
drive was reformatted with ext4, could the backup [image] on the USB stick be
'copied' back to the new ext4 partition, without problems, as it were.