Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2006 10:21:48 -0600 From: "illoai@gmail.com" <illoai@gmail.com> To: "Eric Schuele" <e.schuele@computer.org> Cc: freebsd@orchid.homeunix.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /var corrupted..... Message-ID: <d7195cff0611020821g5263e059ga3f79d1a6c927496@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <454A0699.2000904@computer.org> References: <1162399232.4866.25.camel@ugly> <4548D3DC.3060902@orchid.homeunix.org> <454A0699.2000904@computer.org>
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On 11/2/06, Eric Schuele <e.schuele@computer.org> wrote: > On 11/01/2006 11:05, Karol Kwiatkowski wrote: > > On 01/11/2006 17:40, Eric Schuele wrote: > >> Hello, > >> > >> [Running 6.2-PRERELEASE as of Oct 30th] > >> > >> My /var filesystem on my laptop died this morning. . . . > >> 2) If I have destroyed it what can I do at this point? I have no full > >> backup of /var. I had nothing of any real importance on there. Some > >> MySQL data... but I've got that. My package database comes to mind. > >> but nothing of any personal value... just stuff to keep the OS on its > >> feet. So... if its gone... is there anyway to create a functional /var > >> filesystem that will allow me to "get back to work as usual"? Or is my > >> only option a complete reinstall of everything? . . . > > The downside of this (option 2) is you'll loose some important > > information about your system, /var/db/pkg comes first to my mind. > > With respect to the package database... > I've seen plenty of threads from folks having lost theirs in some form > or fashion, and the solution always seems to be "reinstall everything". > Well, ok... sounds like a PITA, but how hard can it really be. I only > had 30-40 "apps" installed anyway. With their deps it weighs in around > 350 ports total. So I started to do just that. Figured I'd reinstall > in the order I originally installed in the first place. Starting with > Xorg. I go to the port dir and `make install`, thinking it would > reinstall it and all its deps. No go. It does in fact reinstall Xorg, > but none of its deps because it finds them present. Reinstalling 30-40 > apps is one things, having to manually go in and do 350... now thats a PITA! You might be able to force mount the dirty filesystem via mount -f You can also try dd if=/dev/ad0s1d of=some_dang_file_name* And then using mdconfig to play with the resulting file. mdconfig -t vnode -f some_dang_file_name -u 0 && \ mount -f /dev/md0c /mnt (maybe?) If you can get the /var/db/pkg dir off nicely, good luck. *(Note that this could take a long time on a 1 or 2G /var as it reads all of the empty blocks as well, you might want to hand it a bs= and a count= if you know about how much of /var was full at the time, man dd for more details. Also note that I have had faster results using sdd from ports) I had a similar problem a while back and both methods were able to read some of the data from the former /var, however the /var/db/pkg directory was trashed and I ended up having to fall back on the "reinstall everything" method. My method ended up consisting of: 1) reinstalling portupgrade 2) reinstalling several high level programs (opera, mplayer, gnumeric, any window managers, & so on) 3) pkgdb -F which one at a time reinstalls everything depended on. Make sure you have backups of any important files in /usr/local/etc as they may get overwritten. -- --
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