[lug] dumpdates

[Chris Riddoch]

John Starkey <jstarkey at ajstarkey.com> writes:

> Hey... Hugh.... so uhhh... member last night when I expressed my concern
> about making my box... well.... unbootable????

It can be done, but not if you're careful and provide a way for
yourself to back out of changes you've made.  If you change a file,
and suspect it *could* do something bad if you didn't do it right,
make a copy of it.

> It's kinda like this... I uhhhh.... well... I started mv'ing everyting to
> a /*.bak file because well.... I was gonna recompile a kernel... well....
> I kinda moved the /lib file and now I got a kernel panis..

Whoops. I've done worse, myself.  It's harder to recover from deleting
your /usr tree.  Your system, unlike my first one, is probably still
recoverable, as long as you've only renamed files/directories instead
of deleting them, and haven't overwritten anything by moving things
around.

Reboot boot your machine.  At the lilo prompt, type in 'linux' or
whatever the target is for going into Linux, and then a space, and
then 'init=/bin/sh', then enter.  As long as you didn't move *too*
much around in /boot, and /bin/sh is still where it's supposed to be,
you'll be able to get to a root prompt and move /lib back in its
place.

Another reboot and a normal bootup *should* work.

--
Chris Riddoch
socket at peakpeak.com