Fedora Core 2 lost all ability to make DB of installed rpms

[stuartb thelinuxlink net]

To save space I deleted all files in /var/spool/up2date and
/var/spool/repackage. I don't think I was in /var/lib/rpm...
I then did an rpm -qa and saw no rpms!
I then did rpm --initdb  --> no packages if I rpm -qa
I then did rpm --rebuilddb --> no packages if I rpm -qa
I then tried to install a package and I got tons of failed dependencies
like missing glibc and bash.
All programs are on the system but I can not get rpm to know about them.
I can not install packages and be assured of dependencies..
up2date thinks I have nothing on the system too!
How can this be fixed.
I had no backups of /var   I didn't think anything important was there.

Stuart