On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 09:05:54PM +0000, Thomas Halahan wrote: > This is a disaster. Whilst running a configure script (as su) it appears that my root directory was deleted. I could not even run the ls command, for example, and I had to turn the power off. > The partitions are mounted off a directory called /target. I find that using the ls command loaded at boot from the CD I can actually see all my files. However the file allocation table is clearly not ok on normal boot. ext2 doesn't have a file allocation table - but that's beside the point. If you can see all your files when mounting, most of the filesystem is ok. The first thing to do is run e2fsck on the device. It won't write to the disk without asking you, so you can always back out later. Since you killed the power you should expect some deleted inodes without a dtime and some group problems. e2fsck will fix all of these. Assuming the filesystem is ok after e2fsck - the problem could be your linker. Nearly all processes (including init) need the ELF linker and libc to run. Use the `ldd` command to see which libraries a binary needs. If anything like ld.so or libc (both in /lib) has been damaged you end up with a non-bootable system (and yes, ls needs them too) but all the files are there. The libc files are on potato binary cd 1 under dists/potato/binary-i386/base/libc6_2.1.3-10.deb. Unfortunately you didn't include the error messages you got when trying to run ls and when the kernel fails to run init. It could be that you have lost init and ls (/sbin and /bin) in which case the answer is still the same - restore them from debs. AGL -- If you think things can't get worse it's probably only because you lack sufficient imagination.
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