Lost /etc

[steima]

Hello out there I am in panic!



When playing around with my new PCMCIA WLAN card my gentoo crashed.
Im using JFS so why worry about the filesystem? BUT after reboot the init process said it doesnt find a /etc/inittab file.

Booting in single mode I started to cry my /etc directory was lost!

So coudl anyone send me a /etc directory or tell me how to recover the lost one?

Regards Matthias

[beejay]

Hello out there I am in panic!

So coudl anyone send me a /etc directory or tell me how to recover the lost one?

I think sending you a /etc is quite useless since this directory differs from system to system.

How to get back your /etc ? - Well, just playback the appropriate part of your latest backup

I don't get it why people don't create backups of /etc since it really is the smallest directory after /boot - and having a backup of it can prevent a lot of painful work - as you are going to have it now

[steima]

Sure I don't have any backup!

But it doesn't make sense to me at the moment. There is no place where I could backup to.

And be sure I could manage to get my gentoo running again if someone sent me an /etc directory.

Of course I would prefere one from a new installed Gentoo 1.4!

Regards Matthias

[steima]

A friend sent me his /etc in .tgz.

If I'm successful I will post a HOWTO.

Cu

[mmike]

good luck!



süße ente *g*

[steima]

I could save the /etc dir as etc.tar.bz2 on my win xp (im sorry).
When rebooted with gentoo it again asked me for a runlevel.

s brings you in single user mode and starts root bash

unpacked the stuff in /root
moded it to /

reboot->
BANG! of course you should know the root password! the good friend who sends you his etc should reset it first.

next thing ist that you useradd your old users and then make presents.
with chown user.users /home/user so that the users can access their home dirs again

... sure i did not need some services and had to adjust some things but now i needed about 30 minutes to see my X again.

now im playing with the idea of doing something like a backup.

regard matthias

[Zeitgeist]

"something like a backup"

You should always make backups of important directories.
I have a crontab running that backs up my /etc, /root, weekly, one that backs up my music monthly, (did do my movies too.. but that dir is so big now..) and one that backs up my schoolwork hourly.

They are backuped up onto an 80gig firewire drive, but I am sure you could get a cheap usb drive or something now a days too