Re: [gentoo-user] recovery from /var corruption?

[daid kahl <daidxor@gmail.com>]

On 26 February 2010 12:33, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I got my wife's machine booted today using a install disk and
> played a bit with e2fsck. The machine stopped being happy last night
> due to some sort of corruption on the /var partition. e2fsck
> complained about 3 or 4 files and then repaired the partition. The
> machine booted cleanly as far as I can tell.
>
> So, something went bad and I managed to sneak around it for a while
> and now I'm sort of living with the machine wondering what to do.
>
> Do I just watch the logs looking for problems? I have no way of
> knowing right now whether this was a disk problem that's going to come
> back, a 1 time deal due to power, or something else entirely.
>
> As these cheap machines that don't use RAID what's the right way to
> go? emerge -e @world and then wait for the next event? Do nothing and
> wait?
>
> We've got decent personal data backups as well as basic /etc data.
>
> Thanks,
> Mark
>

I reconsidered your problem, and I actually wonder if emerging world
is a valid notion in this case, as the world file is under /var and
this is reported as corrupt.

In this sense, it may be entirely non-trivial to regenerate (without
backup) the correct world-file for a system.

Am I out in the deep end, or is this, in fact, the critical point that
needs consideration here?

~daid