First of all, to those who tried helping me to restore my system from backup after a crash - thanks for your efforts.
It turns out that all of the bizarre errors I was getting which made absolutely no sense were actually related to a failing drive. No wonder I/we couldn't figure things out. I was ******* in the wind the whole time. Too bad I spent over a week of sleepless nights banging my head against the wall.
Anyway, I ended up replacing the failing 100GB 2-1/2" SATA notebook drive with a shiny new 320GB unit (only $89 on sale at a local retail outlet - not too bad). I partitioned, formatted and extracted the backup tarball to it. Then I installed and configured grub but for some reason could never get update-grub to complete successfully. So I edited menu.lst and fstab manually to reflect the drive's new UUID and voila! - it booted right up and my system was right back to the way it was before this whole fiasco. I had spent countless hours configuring and tweaking this 9.04 64-Bit installation and really didn't feel like starting over from scratch. I am very happy.
Besides getting a new high-capacity drive, there was another upside to this. I learned a LOT about the internal workings of the operating system that I probably would never have otherwise had a chance to experience. As a result I'm much more confident that I can recover from future disasters should they occur.
Thanks for reading,
tgeer
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