Hi

Yesterday I was creating a script and just to try something I did
rm -rf /mnt/hda*

I realized to late /mnt/hda3 was uncorrectly mounted to my little debian


It never happened to me in 10 years, there had to be a first time.

So basically , I did a ctrl c 2 seconds after seeing it was abnormally long.
The speed of linux/fs combined with our damned alphabet made that I lost
/boot
/bin
/etc

Nothing really important was lost but I had done tweaking for 1 year.

How would you recover from this stupid error?

I'm thinking of booting with an etch livecd I have, coppying back /etc maybe /bin to at least recover apt-get , then gcc, then recompile a fresh kernel.

Maybe you have other ideas? Is there a rescue mode that could help?
I'm waiting for your comments, I will rebuild my machine in a few days.
I'm a bit concerned about /etc. I'm also thinking of reinstalling from scratch.. sniff


Thanks

Take a look at ddrescue. I don't know if it can help, but you might be able to find something still on the hd. I seem to remember that it could attempt to rebuild file link chains, but it has been a while since I had any reason to use it.

Of course, if you write and new files to the hd, all hope is lost, since the "free" space will probably be overwritten.

Good luck. (And, in the future, consider frequent backups. HDs sometimes fail without our help, too.)

I hate to say it but this is one of the few situations where a reinstall might be the easiest way. Trouble is /etc and /bin are going to contain files from numerous different packages, so your going to have to restore the basic /etc stuff and all the packages that had files in there.

Happend to me once in a bit of a different way but can (like jtshaw said) ensure you that a reinstall is the fastest way to get back up to speed. rm -rf is unforgiving.

Thank you for advices from each of you

I'll have a try on ddrescue. if it can recover even 1 file I'll be happy to look at my old conf. I have kept my complex /etc/fstab because I had done a cat on it just before... lucky me
As I said, fortunatly /home (work data) , /var (which gives me the last packages I installed) where kept.
I fail to boot again kernel compiled on mandriva with gcc from an other partition, merge /bin from an livecd etch. After the boot start, there is a lockup.. /bin should be ok but /etc I have is from that LIVECD, which is very different from a sarge/testing/unstable.

I have a cd of sarge with netinst. I will have to install it on an other partition an use /bin and /etc from this one. Too bad I don't have a simple /etc from the cd.. ?
Then if doesn't work, I surrender I will have tried simple things. No time for longer hacking.. The partition will be transparently erased and re-netinstalled Better for sure.

And yes, I'll have to do at least one backup to recover from big stupidity of user (me in that case hehe) automatically reinstall software by inspecting the logs of apt... 5mn of a perl script
I will improve my install : /boot read only , /etc on an external partition, last kernel,...