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

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:11:54 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

OMFG, I'm back. Whew!

Haven't assessed the damage yet.

I started by trying to boot my real installation (hda3). Sure enough,
it couldn't mount the filesystem. Shut down and tried hda2
installation. Same results. Oh well, I expected that. Time to get out
the CDs.

I started by booting to my Ubuntu live/install DVD. Then I changed my
mind and decided to use Aaron's rescue CD instead. Once it booted I
mounted the usbdisk, hda2 and hda3. Then I copied the contents ( -a )
of the usbdisk (really my old hard disk, not used for the past two
months) to /hda3/bin and to hda2/bin.

[Side comment: Some of us really, really, really need a course in how
to use the cp command. I don't mean just copying one file. I mean how
to get files from one folder into another folder without also creating
a subfolder. I have read how-tos on that until I am dizzy and I can't
ever get it right. I never get the / in the right place, or I use a /
when I shouldn't. It was easy in DOS: Go to a folder and type
"copy /folder/folder/*.* and it copied everything from that folder into
the one you were in. OK it was easy because I understood the rules. Why
is it that I cannot grasp the rules for Linux? Additional comment:
Don't reply by telling me how to do it. This is a problem that requires
hands-on practice; not reading a how-to. I need exercises.]

OK, back to the present.

Finally successfully copied /bin from the usbdisk to the two partitions
on the laptop hard disk, I shut down the Rescue CD and rebooted. Except
I forgot to unmount the hda2 and hda3 partitions first. Also forgot to
unmount and unplug the USB disk. See, once you start ***ing up, you
just keep on ***ing up. Computers know when you have ***ed up. They
purposely make it easy for you to continue ***ing up. Don't ever let a
Linux computer know you don't know what you are doing. Bad enough on a
Windows computer, but a Linux computer has no mercy.

When the Grub menu came up I decided to go for the gusto and boot
straight to hda3 (my real installation). I watched anxiously as it
proceeded, and then heaved a sigh of relief as it started to mount the
filesystem. Oh no! Not shut down clean, fsck forced. And it was hanging
trying to read the USB disk. I decided to abort. I held the power
button down until shut down. Then I pulled out the USB disk and
restarted.

This time things went much better. There was a forced fsck on both hda2
and hda3, but it went smoothly. But then I groaned as I saw the usual
messages replaced with command-line type. This always happens when the
video is borked. Sure enough, lots of video driver errors. But hey! It
booted to my normal installation at a command line! Plus, I had been
here with broken video several times before.

So I did "sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf." (see, I even remembered where
the file was and what it was called), and proceeded to deleted "Nvidia"
and replace it with "nv" in the driver line. Then I restarted.

And when it rebooted, it came right up! No Nvidia video drivers, but I
can fix that later. So here I am. Everything looks exactly as before.
Sylpheed and Firefox are working. I'll deal with the others later.

A thousand thanks to all who helped today. Now I'm off to finish fixing
stuff. And first I'm going to mount my other USB disk, the one I use
for backups, and do an rsync of this whole bloody partition.