/dev is zapped

[John Reynolds <jreyn us ibm com>]

I have a Dell runing RedHat 7.1.  I do not know the history of what 
happened, but during boot it fails with 'Unable to open initial console". 
Booting with my trusty Tom's Root-boot floppy, I find that /dev/ is almost 
empty; there are a few directories like ptys, but console, mouse,  all the 
disks, etc are AWOL.

I'm only guessing how /dev got blitzed, but frankly I don't care that 
much; the primary problem is how to force the system to re-create the /dev 
entries during bootup.  A quick exam of manpages and the archives didn't 
suggest anything.  I toyed with the idea of getting a dump of /dev on a 
similar system and restoring it, but the odds are good that the device IDs 
wouldn't match, and then I'm in it even deeper.

 Any tips?

Thanks as always.

John Reynolds
SEEL-IT Data Management
IBM-by-the-Bay
San Francisco CA