Repairing a corrupted system

From: Martin McCormick (martin_at_dc.cis.okstate.edu)
Date: 02/10/05

  • Next message: Benedict Verheyen: "Re: switch from 2.4.24 lvm1 to 2.6.10 lvm 2 problems" 
    To: Debian User <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:32:05 -0600

            I have a Debian3.0 system at home and another at work that
    are both very similar to one another except that one uses a different
    sound card. Both are Dell Dimension from about 1999 or so.

            I killed my home system last Saturday when a shell script I
    was using to shred old files on a backup hard drive followed a link
    and ate part of /lib which is an extremely bad thing to do.

            I didn't have a backup of /lib on my home system but /lib from
    the work system was from the very same distribution of Debian and had
    to support almost exactly the same hardware or types of hardware
    except for the sound card.

            What I did was to mount the root file system and a CDROM
    containing the tar ball on mount points of of the Debian installation
    disk. I played it safe and moved the corrupted /lib to /lib.bad and
    then un-tar'd /lib from the "good" system. I appear to be about 99%
    whole, now. The boot messages look like they always have and all file
    systems that are supposed to mount are there and functional.

            What didn't come back completely was the sound card. I do
    have the /lib.bad directory with its modules for the kernel I am
    using. I can tell what has been corrupted by looking at the dates of
    the files since the mangled ones are dated at their time of death and
    all the others come from 2002. If lib/modules is not corrupted, is it
    safe to just put it back in the new /lib since those modules will be
    the ones for the correct sound card?

            I figure this is both a learning exercise and an attempt to
    avoid rebuilding the entire system.:-(

            There are other well-known OS's in which this sort of mess
    means a reinstall, but UNIX is a little more forgiving I think. I am
    glad I didn't just delete the old /lib.

            Any ideas are welcome. Next time, I'll back up /lib on the
    system I am messing with. Shame on me.

    Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
    OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group 

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