[PLUG] OK, now I did it. Deleted /bin

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 14:56:12 -0700
Ronald Chmara <ron at opus1.com> dijo:

> John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > As far as I know, both are broken. That's because I deleted the /bin
> > folder on both.

> That's extremely unlikely, as you would have to be mounting *two* 
> folders with /bin in them, at the same place.... or, alternately, you 
> only ever had *one* bin folder.

One is (was) in / and the other was at /media/hda2. I was definitely at
jjj/Devil5/media/hda2$ when I gave it the command. Anyway, here's my
most recent theory about what happened. I know I tried the rmdir
command more than once. I could swear I got error messages indicating
it didn't work before I tried it again with different syntax. But what
if I did:

jjj/devil5/media/hda2$ sudo rmdir -r bin

And thought it didn't work, so then did:

jjj/devil5/media/hda2$ sudo rmdir -r /bin.

If that would result in the current mess, then that's how it happened.
I definitely remember trying it without the /.

> But doing it live like this is more fun, and more of a challenge. :-)

You definitely do not forget lessons learned like this. :(

> Since /bin is gone, you can (or rather, must?) use tools from /usr/bin 
> and /usr/sbin (and /usr/local/bin, etc. etc.) to find and get your /bin/ 
> tools back. Thankfully, that's a *lot* of tools at your disposal.... and 
> find (the command) can happily help you get to the "other" bin, if it 
> still exists... how far have you gotten? Do you have a working terminal 
> yet, or do you need to make a new user entry, with a shell that *isn't* 
> a shell from /bin?

I still have not shut down because I am sure neither installation would
boot. That is because, lacking the /bin directory, I can't mount or
unmount disks. That means that Grub wouldn't find a filesystem. Not even
if I try booting in Recovery Mode. I keep hoping I can fix it without
having to shut down and restart. If I do have to, my plan is to use a
Rescue CD that I copied from Aaron at a Clinic a couple months ago. It
boots you as root at a command line. And it has three mount points
available. At the time I got his Rescue CD I was replacing my hard
drive (which is what I originally used the Rescue CD for). I still have
the old hard drive, and it's now in a USB enclosure. So, push come to
shove, I can boot with the Rescue CD, mount the old hard drive as well
as hda2 and hda3, and copy the old /bin folder over. The problem is
that I don't know what else has gone into /bin in the past couple
months.

And I still don't have a terminal. Synaptic is running, however. I
tried reinstalling bash and gnome-terminal but, even though the
reinstall went without error messages, I still can't get a terminal
open. I can Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a command line, but when I try to log in the
prompt for the password never comes up. So it appears I am stuck
without a way to get to a command line.

Just now I tried to create a new user, but when I went into System >
Administration > Users and Groups, it wouldn't take my password. Odd
that Synaptic did.

I just looked at /usr/bin and /user/local/bin. The former has 1699
items (according to Nautilus), but the latter is empty.

Luckily I am still functional as to e-mail, browser, etc. And there is
no rush. And I do have a complete backup of /home made yesterday to an
external drive. It's just that I don't have a backup of the entire
filesystem.

Thanks for the suggestions and observations. Still poking away here
hoping to be able to fix it.