Recovering from removal of 1.3 "base" package?
I was helping a friend upgrade his Debian 1.3 system to a Debian 2.0
system. We first compiled and installed a more recent kernel then ran
autoup.sh. That went well. While I was at it I installed apt and set
deselect up to use apt accesses.
We were not able to carry on with something simple like
apt-get dist-upgrade
because there were 150 packages to upgrade and insufficient disk
space. I did some piecemeal upgrades and got most of the packages set
up.
I noticed that space on the / partition was getting dangerously low.
Dselect was reporting that several essential packages were obsolete so
I went in and removed them to save space. I used the
--force-remove-essential flag and assured dpkg that I knew what I was
doing. Turns out that I didn't.
The machine will not boot now. It is particularly unfortunate that
the machine is in Australia and I am in North America. It is
difficult for me to sit down at the console now to repair things.
I believe the immediate problem is that removing the base package
removed several special files in /dev. It appears that /dev/null and
/dev/tty[0-6] at least are gone. I have recommended to my friend that
he
- boot from the Debian 2.0 rescue disk
- mount the / and /usr partitions when asked for this
- start a shell
- cd to /target/dev and use mknod to create any device files that appear
to be necessary
- try to reboot.
We haven't tried this yet. Does anyone know offhand if there are
other things we will need to repair before getting the system to boot?
We could go all the way and install the system from the base disks on
the old partitions without initializing them. I suspect this will
mean that we then have to re-install all the packages on the system.
I would prefer not to lose the configuration information that is
already on the disk if we can avoid it. If we do need to go the route
of installing from the base disks does anyone have suggestions for
what files we should try to preserve first?
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