stupidity and disaster

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

Hello ..

I seem to have done something very stupid. If anyone can tell me what
exactly it was that I did wrong, or better still, help me recover what
I'm very afraid might be a hopelessly trashed filesystem, I'd be very
grateful.

The system is Debian 1.3, kernel version 2.0.30

I wanted to upgrade from bash-2.0 to bash-2.02 (to solve a problem
with getting Netscape 4.05 and the Real Audio Player to work
together). I downloaded bash-2.02 from the GNU archive and installed
it in /usr/local. The binary in /usr/local/bin . The next step must
have been where I committed my stupidity .... I renamed /bin/bash to
/bin/bash-2.0 and make a symbolic link from /usr/local/bash-2.02 to
/bin/bash (hoping that this would just drop the new bash in in place
of the old) .

Everything seemed fine; my problem was solved; I was happy.

When I went to boot again today, I was not happy. Thr boot proceeded
normally until:

  VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly
  INIT: version 2.71 booting
  INIT: cannot execute "/etc/init.d/boot"
  INIT: entering runlevel: 2
  INIT: cannot execute "etc/init.d/rc"

  Debian GNU Linux 1.3 (none) tty1
  (none) login root: root
  Password:
  Jul 11 15:03:20 login[8]: unable to change tty `dev/tty1' for user `root'
  Unable to change tty /dev/tty1: Bad file number

Trying to shutdown gracefully with Ctl-Alt-Delete gives:

  INIT: Switching to runlevel: 6
  INIT: Sending processess the TERM signal
  INIT: cannot execute "/etc/init.d/rc"
   Give root password for maintenance
   (or type Ctl-D for normal startup):
   /bin/bash: No such file or directory
   /bin/sh: No such file or directory

The root password seems to be recognized, but it seems that I've left
the system with no way to find a shell.

Have I destroyed this nice thing totally?  I'd be very grateful indeed
for any help or advice ....

Jim McCloskey


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