How to check backup restoration on SD card

Question

My Pi SD card got corrupted. I restored it from a backup on my Ubuntu system some time back but I'm not sure if I've done it correctly.

Looking on my Windows machine I see

<DIR>      defaults
<DIR>      os
    17,824 bootcode.bin
       269 BUILD-DATA
     2,249 INSTRUCTIONS-README.txt
        57 recovery.cmdline
   512,536 recovery.elf
 2,097,376 recovery.img
20,552,946 recovery.rfs
     9,728 riscos-boot.bin

The os folder lists as follows:

<DIR>          .
<DIR>          ..
<DIR>          Arch
<DIR>          data_partition
<DIR>          Pidora
<DIR>          Raspbian
<DIR>          RaspBMC
<DIR>          RISC_OS

I can't get the Pi to boot so I guess I'm missing the bootloader or similar.

Can anyone give me a check procedure?

Answer 1

The simplest most reliable way to make a backup of an RPi SD Card is to make a full ISO image copy of the SD Card using an external SD Card reader and free imaging software like HDD Raw Copy Tool.

Most likely you have not made a complete backup of your original SD Card image. To try to recover what you can I would suggest to completely re-image the SD Card (build it from scratch the way you originally made the SD Card) and then copy over what you have for backup files. If you're lucky, the rebuilt SD Card will be bootable and copying over your backup files might recover your work.