On 10/12/99 Todd Suess wrote:
I have a feeling I will be reinstalling my system, but I was going thru and cleaning up old logs, etc and accidently deleted /var/lib/dpkg/status when Imeant to delete the old status files. Is there any way to regenerate the statusfile or is dpkg now totally and horribly broken?
dpkg keeps several backups of that file you should be able to restore one of the backups and then redo a apt-get update / upgrade if you have done those recently, you need to try and reinstall any packages you installed that are not known to the backup status file..
i did worse then this, I accidently erased my entire /var/ filesystem (don't be root at 5AM when you are tired :| ) fortunately i had made a backup of it only 2 or 3 days before so i was able to restore it and just rerun apt-get update/dist-upgrade which are the only changes i had been making (keeping potato system up to date) i only had one cantankerous package then noticed the inconsistency and threw fits about it (cannot remember the name of it at the moment) when i tried to remove it (it was already removed) all i had to do to solve this was find its entry in the status file and change its status to not-installed (thank god for human readable dpkg databases!!) and all was well, i've been running it for a while now and nothing from that has come back to haunt me. :-)
now if you have deleted all your status files and have no backups anywhere then I do not now what you can do..
-- Ethan Benson To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/