Re: [gentoo-user] how to recover a portage that wasn't in use for very long time

[Alexey Luchko <luchik@gmail.com>]

Nick Fortino wrote:
> Alexey Luchko wrote:
>> I have a gentoo installed, but I wasn't updating it since late 2007, I 
>> suppose.
>> Today I've run emerge --sync. It worked! It's great ;)
>>
>> But then I've got the following collision. Obviously, a portage update 
>> is required. But it is confused by dependencies:
>> colinux ~ # emerge portage --pretend --tree
>> These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:
>> [cut]
>> [blocks B     ] <sys-apps/portage-2.1.5 (is blocking 
>> app-shells/bash-3.2_p39)
>> colinux ~ #
>>
> I worked on this a couple months back to make it possible. The key is to 
> download binary packages of portage and a few dependencies to break the 
> block. Once portage is upgraded, it's smart enough to figure things out 
> now. An original script an discussion can be found at 
> http://blog.jolexa.net/2009/03/25/gentoo-tips-to-upgrade-your-really-old-installation/ 
> 
> A slightly modified version is here inline. I would recommend against 
> running it as a script, but rather do the steps individually (also, if 
> you aren't running amd64, be sure to change the architecture of the 
> binaries you are downloading).
> 
> Read this line as typical warnings of your mileage may very etc.

I decided to try this way first.

I've got a problem on the way and hopefully restored the system.
The problem appeared after downloading and extracting new bash:
wget 
http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/default-linux/x86/app-shells/bash-3.2_p39.tbz2
tar xfpj root/All/bash-3.2_p39.tbz2

Every next execution of bash (and sh also) gave me:
colinux ~ # sh
sh: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by sh)

I didn't get through it, but rather restored the partition from backup.
By the way, does one know a windows tool, that can write a partition directly?

If one is interested, I managed to get this way:
I had the backup on the windows host system.
I replaced my root's shell with /usr/bin/python and wrote a script that did 
what "cat > /dev/cobd/4" would do if it was available.
The I restored the system running the following:
$ gzip -d < /z/inst/colinux/colinux20090512.img.gz | ssh root@colinux -C 
'execfile("cat.py"); cat("/dev/cobd/4")'

It's really funny, but writing these lines I've understand that I had mounted 
host file system, and I could have restored the backup through it.


Have a nice time ;)
Alexey.