David E. Fox wrote:
had a big problem this afternoon - had some serious issues with the
reiserfs on /dev/hda1 (an oldish 1.6 gig maxtor), ended up not being
able to fsck it to an orderly state. Had to redo the whole fs, (should
have made a backup) and grab a /var from a ubuntu disk. Obviously,
ubuntu is not debian, but their /var structure should be similar enough
that I can fix the problems after the fact.
I've also had some issues with reiserfs and have always sticked to ext3
ever since. I guess the advantages of reiserfs don't warrant experiments
on important data. ext3 is rock solid on debian. YMMV.
2 major problems remain:
using postfix, this has been working for years, ran postfix check to
recreate the missing directories, and my machine
(m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com) is getting the mail fine. I just can't *send*
mail. Postfix tells me that there is an unknown transport for the mail
I try to send, and holds it in the queue.
The other issue - I no longer have a working repository for dpkg
describing what files are installed. Is there a way to recreate it
without a reinstall? I noticed that aptitude upgrade was fetching down
a number of things, but as I don't know what it's upgrading *from* I
don't know if I can trust it. Another thing - aptitude update was going
very slowly and experiencing connection time outs periodically during
the execution, so I don't think I can trust it. On the other hand, dpkg
--get-selections gives me a number of things, but honestly I think
those where what Ubuntu put there? Obviously, that is not what I want.
I'm hoping to not have to reinstall this thing :).
/var has all variable data of your system except configuration files.
Ie. the data on /var depends on your system and cannot be just copied
from ubuntu.
For some help to get from here, see
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-package.en.html#s-recover-status
and the part about recovering from lost /var further down that page.
When I had a similar problem, I didn't feel comfortable to continue
using the 'recovered' /var and finally reinstalled after taking
snapshots of /etc and recovering the package selection data from /etc/
and /usr/share/doc.
HTH, good luck,
Johannes
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