None of the 3 dd backups I made were bootable - at boot, selecting the drive put me into grub rescue mode, which seemed to suggest that the /boot partition did not exist on the backed up disk, despite the fact that I was able to mount this partition on a booted computer. Perhaps for the same reason, but maybe not.
After going through various StackOverflow posts / blogs / other googling, I decided to try cloning the drives using ddrescue instead of dd.
This seems to have worked for nodus - I was able to boot to console on the machine called rosalba which was lying around under my desk. I deliberately did not have this machine connected to the martian network during the boot process for fear of some issues because of having multiple "nodus"-es on the network, so it complained a bit about starting the elog and other network related issues, but seems like we have a plug-and-play version of the nodus root filesystem now.
chiara and fb1 rootfs backups (made using ddrescue) are still not bootable - I'm working on it.
Nov 6 2017: I am now able to boot the chiara backup as well - although mysteriously, I cannot boot it from the machine called rosalba, but can boot it from ottavia. Anyways, seems like we have usable backups of the rootfs of nodus and chiara now. FB1 is still a no-go, working on it.
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Looks to have worked this time around.
controls@fb1:~ 0$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=64K conv=noerror,sync
33554416+0 records in
33554416+0 records out
2199022206976 bytes (2.2 TB) copied, 55910.3 s, 39.3 MB/s
You have new mail in /var/mail/controls
I was able to mount all the partitions on the cloned disk. Will now try booting from this disk on the spare machine I am testing in the office area now. That'd be a "real" test of if this backup is useful in the event of a disk failure.
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