/dev is zapped

[Matthew Galgoci]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, John Reynolds wrote:

> Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 14:03:04 -0700
> From: John Reynolds <jreyn at us.ibm.com>
> Reply-To: Getting started with Red Hat Linux
>     <redhat-install-list at redhat.com>
> To: redhat-install-list at redhat.com
> Subject: /dev is zapped
> 
> 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?

Re-install the dev rpm. use --force and --upgrade flags at the same time, which
will ensure that you have exactly one copy of the dev rpm installed.

Getting a tarball of /dev from another similar machine and untarring it is also
an option if you for some reason cannot use rpm or rpm2cpio.

More than likely you had some disk corruption and most of the stuff in the /dev
directory got e2fscked away into /lost+found. This means of course that your 
disk will likely fail again if this is in fact the case.
 
-- 
Matthew Galgoci
System Administrator and Sr. Manager of Ruminants
Red Hat, Inc
919.754.3700 x44155