rescue needed: corrupted /lib/libc.so.6

[erickfour]

For reasons I'm not going to go into here, I no longer have a working /lib/libc.so.6. Is there anything to be done besides a complete reinstall? I can't chroot in to re-emerge it... help!


thanks,

e

[NeddySeagoon]

erickfour,

You need a working glibc of the same version as you broke for your arch, or a compatible one.
I have some but no 64 bit ones.

When you have the binary package tarball, you boot with the liveCD, mount your partitions and get the tarball into /mnt/gentoo.
After you untar it there, you should be back in business.

The first thing you do after that is emerge glibc.

You may find that

[erickfour]

Thanks for the advice, NeddySeagoon.

I need a glibc 2.3.6 (for a PIII). I have another gentoo box with a more up to date profile that has a glibc 2.4. Could I temporarily change the profile to something without nptl, make a package, then move it over? Also, I've never installed something directly from a package tarball... are there some dox for that or will it be obvious?

I'm now trying to tread delicately so not to screw up another computer!

e

[NeddySeagoon]

erickfour,

I'm not having a lot of luck posting this ... I had an emerge running in the background (3 times now).
It drank all the beer in my fridge and filled up all of memory and swap, causing me to loose my post.
Thats life with ~x86 sometimes.

Anyway - back to yor problem. I don't have a glibc that will suit you. When you get one, you untar it like a stage tarball. tar xjpvf <file> in the root of your normal install. Thats /mnt/gentoo when you boot the liveCD and mount your partitions.

You can get a glibc out of a stage 3, or make one to suit as follows. You will need space to untar a stage 3 and a little bit more.

Boot the liveCD, mount your filesystems and your swap.
Make a new dir at say /mnt/gentoo/newdir
Put a stage 3 tarball into /mnt/gentoo/newdir and untar it there.
mount your /proc and /dev onto the /mnt/gentoo/newdir/proc and /mnt/gentoo/newdir/dev
Check that /mnt/gentoo/newdir/usr/portage exists and make it if not
bind mount your real /usr/portage there, it saves getting a snapshot.
mount -o bind /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage /mnt/gentoo/newdir/usr/portage
copy your /etc/resolv.conf to mnt/gentoo/newdir/etc/resolv.conf, or yor network wont work shortly.
You now have a stage 3, in newdir thats ready to be chrooted into.
Do it with

[erickfour]

Neddy--

Awesome! OK, now my system is mostly back to normal.

There is one rather embarassing problem to fix. In a true shooting-self-in-foot moment, previous to the total corruption of libc.so.6, I added glibc to package.unmask, then emerged glibc-2.4. Ook! Now that i'm back to 2.3.6, I get the error message

[erickfour]

after a bit more fudging about, i'm back to normal.

Neddy-- THANK YOU! People like you make gentoo possible for people like me (who occasionally do very stupid things).