The pacman database was in /var so there's little point in trying to reinstall 
the same packages

What about software updates, security fixes, etc? ;-)

What is the less pain method to get it again up and running? The problem I
see are pacman list of installed packages?

Although you don't know what packaged you had (/var lost), you may use /usr/bin/pkgfile to determine what package a file belongs to, e.g.

% pkgfile /usr/lib/liblink-grammar.so
extra/link-grammar

Run this across all the files in /usr, /etc and others, and you have a list of the packages that need to be installed again.

Note: you need pkgfile, which means you need it from pacman, which means you need to pacstrap. Daniel wrote how to do it.

--
Kind regards,
Damian Nowak
StratusHost
www.AtlasHost.eu

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