/var partition damaged

[Christoph Groth <cgroth@gmx.net>]

Hello all,

While booting yesterday my potato system once again the the mount
count was exceeded and I realized that there are serious problems with
my /var partition: After booting in single user mode e2fsck had to
delete a lot of files (lost+found contains 42M of stuff!).

Luckily, my system works to some extent but some important files are
missing (for example /var/lib/locate/ is gone, so locate doesn't work)
or X has problems initing some keymaps so that backspace works as
delete.  More seriously, dpkg has problems, too.  Probably there are
even more things that don't work properly.

I have an IBM DTLA307030 hard drive and maybe it's malfunctioning in
some way, I'll have to fetch some testing software from IBM.

Now to the real question:
What should I do now in order to repair my system?  Is there some way
to recreate the files in /var without reinstalling?  Unfortunately I
don't have /var backups...

I have put a lot of work into configuring my system.  Probably I could
delete the /usr and / partitions and after installing the packages
I had previously from scratch copy the old configuration to /etc?
Would this work?  Is there a way to output a list of installed
packages when `dpkg --get-selections' doesn't work?

Any help is greatly appreciated,

Christoph