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
