Help!

[Todd Suess <tsuess@inspace.net>]

I accidently did something quite stupid while tired
(never be root when tired.  sigh)
I accidently removed /var/lib/dpkg/status while I was removing
some of the old status files to save some room in my /var
partition.  Now, of course, dpkg has no idea of what packages are
installed, and is badly broken.  Is there ANY way of getting dpkg
to read all the info in /var/lib/dpkg/info or the other directories and
making it rebuild the status file?  I have checked the docs, and
even tired to recover any of the files using the ex2fs file recovery
HOWTO but I failed.  Any suggestions you could give me would be
most appreciated, because I really do not want to rebuild my entire
system from scratch.  :(

Thanks in advance,

Todd