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

Ronald Chmara ron at opus1.com
Mon Jul 24 23:32:33 UTC 2006


John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 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.
>   
That'd do it.

>> 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.
>
> 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.
You need /bin/login installed to see that.... that package is helpfully 
called "login".
Try re-installing that.... (did Synaptic actually put /bin/bash back, or 
is /bin still missing, along with /bin/bash?)

I don't know about your *specific* install, here's a fairly stripped 
down sarge box's /bin:
--
arch   dir            gzip            mkdir       ping6      su          
zdiff
bash   dmesg          hostname        mknod       ps         sync        
zegrep
cat    dnsdomainname  kernelversion   mktemp      pwd        tar         
zfgrep
chgrp  echo           kill            more        rbash      tcsh        
zforce
chmod  ed             ln              mount       readlink   tempfile    
zgrep
chown  egrep          loadkeys        mountpoint  rm         touch       
zless
cp     false          login           mt          rmdir      true        
zmore
cpio   fgconsole      ls              mt-gnu      run-parts  umount      
znew
csh    fgrep          lsmod           mv          sed        uname
dash   fuser          lsmod.modutils  nano        setpci     uncompress
date   grep           lspci           netstat     sh         vdir
dd     gunzip         mbchk           pidof       sleep      zcat
df     gzexe          mkbimage        ping        stty       zcmp
--

Many of these commands have packages of the same name. (Of course, once 
you can get a mount going, you won't need to reinsatll all of these 
though Synaptic...)

>  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.
>   
Don't forget /usr/sbin too.. :-)




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