This is a first for me! As you may have noted from earlier postings, I
have been working on a source build process for distribution construction.
During the build of one of the source packages, the system "went away".
Upon rebooting the system, I got told that there was no console device, so
I rebooted to my "emergency" slink system. (My normal development system
is on hda1, with hda2 for swap, and hda3 for the slink system)
/dev contained the empty directory /pty, and a |init* file.
Recovering /dev from hda3 just brought up further errors:
/etc/init.d and /etc/resolv.conf are gone, but most of /etc is still
there.
/bin is completely gone, as is /boot, although the system will still boot
on either the hda3 kernel or the hda1 kernel (both of which reside in
/dev/hda1/boot), so although the file system doesn't seem to know about
these files, they are still there for LILO to use.
Worse yet, my whole /Debian partition is wiped clean, so I will have to
recover from original source and hope I haven't lost too much work.
Before I rebuild this system and recover, I would like to understand just
what happened, so I "don't do that" again.
It is pretty hard to understand how a script failure in the middle of a
source extraction process (which is what seemed to happen just before the
lockup), could cause such pinpoint failures as those seen above. Why did
/bin go away, but only parts of /etc? Why did /boot and /bin go away
entirely, but /dev only got most of its contents removed?
I'm going to take my time "recovering" from this, as there are things
still on hda1 that I am likely to want saved. Any helpful hints about how
to keep such things from happening in the future would be greatfully
appreciated.
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769
Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
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