/dev is zapped

[Stuart Sears]

On Monday 02 August 2004 22:03, John Reynolds wrote:
> 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.
nope, they'd probably be the same...
>  Any tips?
If you have your install CDs...
boot from disc 1 (if you can, if not then from a boot floppy) and type
linux rescue
at the 'boot:' prompt
then in the rescue environment you can force install the dev....rpm package if 
you like
ie 
rpm -ivh --force --root /mnt/sysimage \
 /mnt/source/RedHat/RPMS/dev-thingy-wotsit.rpm

(if you are booting from CD the CD is automatically mounted under /mnt/source 
using NFS)

you will get some error messages about updating the rpm database, but you can 
ignore these...
>
HTH

Stuart
-- 
Stuart Sears RHCE, RHCX