crash by installing bad libc5...

[Gregory Guthrie <guthrie@mum.edu>]

We had a working 2.1 system, and by mistake an intern got libc5 and 
un-tar'ed it.

This killed the system, as dynamic loading libraries seemed to get trashed.

We tried to recover by booting to a 2.1 CDrom, hoping to then dselect 
re-install the good libc6, but it had a lot of weird errors;

1) can't write boot sector to logical partition,
2) file error, can't load base-tgz files (after finding them on the CDrom, ..)
... etc.

We finally did a re-initialization of the linux partition, and all went well.

Q: Why was re-loading from the CDrom broken by a trashed base (root) 
install on the hard-disk?

I would expect that booting to the CDrom would be immune to a messed up 
target system, almost by definition; as this would be the recovery method.

The /target partition was basically intact, could be mounted, browsed, etc, 
but trying to execute from it would give errors like libcso??... not found. 
(sorry, not exact..!)

Already recovered, but wondering what was wrong and why we could not fix it 
without a complete re-install.

Thanks.

Gregory

--------------------------------------------------------
Gregory Guthrie
guthrie@mum.edu         (515)472-1125    Fax: -1103
       Computer Science Department
       College of Science and Technology
       Maharishi University of Management
       http://www.mum.edu/csdept
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