How to restore corrupted initscripts?

[John O'Hagan <johnohagan@iprimus.com.au>]

Hi,

When shutting down my etch laptop of late, it stops just short of power-off 
with a message along the lines of "No more processes in this runlevel". I 
then have to power-off manually. 

I looked in /etc/init.d and noticed that the "halt" script was no longer a 
script, but a text file containing configuration for asterisk. Also, the 
mountvirtfs script had been replaced by a gif image! This explained some 
other boot error messages I had been getting e.g., about /proc and /sys.

I'm guessing this was caused by some random filesystem corruption I've been 
getting lately as a result of a faulty power-supply in the laptop, requiring 
manually running fsck.(It's an ext3 filesystem.) Even after this I 
occasionally notice random file substitutions like the above. 

But my question is, how to fix it? 

So far I've tried reinstalling iniscripts (the package which provides the 
missing scripts) but for some reason this fails to replace them, even with 
the dodgy ones moved out of the way. 

I was going to try purging initscripts before reinstalling, but was scared off 
by some heavy warnings from apt-get.

Any insights or advice?

Thanks,

John