Corruption many (unknown) files; how best to restore?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Hi all.


    HISTORY (the actual question is below):

For some reason my Sid box at home has been locking up in X lately. I don't
know if it's an X problem, or a hardware problem, or what. I'm running 
2.2.18; have been for months without any problem, so I doubt it's any bug
within the kernel.

I've just run memtest86, and it seems that my RAM's fine.

I had a hard drive fail a couple of months or so ago; I pulled it out and
replaced it (it had /usr and /home on it) and rebuilt as best I could; I
think I got it working.

Then last week I put that failed drive back in to see if I could recover
any data off of it before consigning it to it's eternal resting place. After
finding a bay to rest it in and plugging in an IDE data cable, I realized I
didn't have any extra power plugs for it. So I left it that way until I
could get a power splitter. I figured that not having any power to it, the
system would ignore it.

I think maybe my suspicion was incorrect, and that the system saw this drive
and got confused and started doing nasty things. I shut down and unplugged
the drive, and restarted the system. Everything looked fine, except that
KDM no longer started an X session; it acted the same way that it would if
there was something wrong, like a wrong mouse section, in the XF86Config
file. But I could start X with the startx command, so I just figured it was
some glitch I downloaded with my most recent upgrade of Sid.

Nevertheless, since then I've started having lockups in X. It may be
related to a Windows-based Backgammon game I'm running via Wine (this game
typically bombs now, whereas it used to work fine).

To make this (very) long story short, the repeated crashing and subsequent
resets (no way to ssh/telnet in, and loss of keyboard control) has tended
to do nasty things to my file system.



    ACTUAL QUESTION:

I don't know which files/packages are corrupt; is there any automated way
to have the system check to see what's installed, what's broken, and what
needs to be reinstalled to fix what's broken?

Thanks.

Kent