Repairing a corrupted system

[Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>]

	I have a Debian3.0 system at home and another at work that
are both very similar to one another except that one uses a different
sound card.  Both are Dell Dimension from about 1999 or so.

	I killed my home system last Saturday when a shell script I
was using to shred old files on a backup hard drive followed a link
and ate part of /lib which is an extremely bad thing to do.

	I didn't have a backup of /lib on my home system but /lib from
the work system was from the very same distribution of Debian and had
to support almost exactly the same hardware or types of hardware
except for the sound card.

	What I did was to mount the root file system and a CDROM
containing the tar ball on mount points of of the Debian installation
disk.  I played it safe and moved the corrupted /lib to /lib.bad and
then un-tar'd /lib from the "good" system.  I appear to be about 99%
whole, now.  The boot messages look like they always have and all file
systems that are supposed to mount are there and functional.

	What didn't come back completely was the sound card.  I do
have the /lib.bad directory with its modules for the kernel I am
using.  I can tell what has been corrupted by looking at the dates of
the files since the mangled ones are dated at their time of death and
all the others come from 2002.  If lib/modules is not corrupted, is it
safe to just put it back in the new /lib since those modules will be
the ones for the correct sound card?

	I figure this is both a learning exercise and an attempt to
avoid rebuilding the entire system.:-(

	There are other well-known OS's in which this sort of mess
means a reinstall, but UNIX is a little more forgiving I think.  I am
glad I didn't just delete the old /lib.

	Any ideas are welcome.  Next time, I'll back up /lib on the
system I am messing with.  Shame on me.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group