On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 09:41:01AM -0800, Michael K O'Brien wrote:
> Hola~
>
> The motherboard on my Dell Inspiron 8000 died, and was replaced. After fsck
Avoid Dell IMHO...
> cleaned up the drive, dpkg was failing:
>
> % dpkg -l g++\*
> dpkg-query: failed to open package info file `/var/lib/dpkg/status' for
> reading: No such file or directory
>
> A version of it was in lost+found. I moved the version from lost+found back to
> "/var/lib/dpkg/status". dpkg lists packages now. apt-cache update looks like
> it works.
Hm. Sounds like the directory /var/lib/dpkg got corrupted somehow. Bad
sign.
What about other stuff under /var/lib/dpkg? Especially
/var/lib/dpkg/info, since that contains the install/remove scripts for
each package. That's worth worrying about too...
> I guess I'm a bit nervous of the integrity of the status file. Is there any
> way to verify the status file?
I don't know of any way of verifying it for certain, but there are a
couple of ways of building confidence in that it is correct:
- if dpkg doesn't complain, odds are that it is not corrupted.
Definitely a good sign. Whether it is *correct* is a slightly
different matter.
- Compare with the backup files : /var/backups/dpkg.status.* - AFAIK
dpkg makes backups whenever you install/remove things (somebody is
bound to know exactly when - please shout!). A simple diff between
them should then only show differences for packages recently
installed/removed/upgraded.
- Every installed package *should* end up creating a directory under
/usr/share/doc (or /usr/doc for older packages; not sure what
qualifies as "old here"). If you have directories under
/usr[/share]/doc that do not match the name of an installed package,
then something is inconsistent. IIRC there are a couple of exceptions
to this rule, mainly consisting of directories that start with an
upper case letter - they won't correspond to packages.
Apart from this there is always google: a google search on "recover
/var/lib/dpkg" brings up a couple of interesting links, amongst other
things (surprise!):
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/quick-reference/ch-package.en.html
A couple of months back there was a (short?) discussion in one of the
debian lists on how to recover a fully hosed /var - that's bound to be
in the archives/google somewhere.
HTH
--
Karl E. Jørgensen
karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor's throat without having
his neighbour notice it.
-- Trygve Lie
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