[TriLUG] Oops.. Super User Error :-)

[Brian Henning]

Hi Y'all,
  In a moment of extreme brain-farting, I just royally fscked up my /
partition (literally--ran fsck with no arguments on a mounted filesystem).
The system isn't in production use yet, so it's not a horrible emergency,
but I do stand to lose quite a bit of perl scripting work if I can't recover
the info..  So..  Here's what went down:

I fsck'ed and "continued anyway".

Then, moments later, tried to man something, man - command not found.
Uh-oh.

/sbin/shutdown was still found (along with su, fortunately, because I had
exited), so I /sbin/shutdown -r now and ran to watch the system messages on
the local terminal..  And it was spewing forth invalid inode messages and
the ominous-sounding "journal aborted."

So after it became fairly apparent that nothing good was going to come of
that, I hit Reset.

Now, "label '/' not found" pops up from makedevfs, or something like that,
and it won't boot (kernel panics).

So obviously I've done a Very Bad Thing (TM).  Is there any way to Save My
Butt (TM) or am I resigned to reformatting and reinstalling, and just losing
the little bit of not-backed-up data that was there?  Again, it's not a
production machine yet, so it's really just an avoid-the-royal-PITA factor,
but nonetheless, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
~Brian Henning

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Brian A. Henning
Strutmasters.com
866.597.2397
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