portage as a recovery tool

thegoonden · Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2004 3:56 am Post subject: portage as a recovery tool

Further to my previous post in the "other things gentoo" forum
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=122010
( I shattered my root fs somehow)
I realised that since my /var and /usr are on other partitions, it may be possible to do the following.

1a. install a gentoo stage 2 tarball to the former root partition.
1b. follow the first few steps of the installation guide
2. relink /usr and /var to the previous partiions ( they are both subdirs in one partition rather than each being on their own)
3. do emerge world

Will this, as I suspect, return my system to something approaching it's pre-idiot state? ( notwithstanding that I'll have a bit of work to do in /etc)

Are their any gotchas I should be aware of, or does anyone have any advice regarding where I should jump off the installation guide and go my own way.

Cheers folks.

ender wiggin · Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2004 4:14 am Post subject:

My opinion - /usr and /var aren't all that important. /usr contains all of the installed programs that are a part of the "official distribution", and /var contains "variable data" - logs and such. The only directories that I worry about when recovering / reinstalling a machine are /home (user data) and /etc (configurations). You could argue for keeping /boot as well, if you want to save a little time fiddling with the kernel, or you could just save /usr/src/linux/.config.

Basically what I'm getting at is, if all you've got left is /usr and /var, you might as well start from scratch.
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thegoonden · Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2004 6:05 am Post subject:

Well, /boot and /home are cool too, they also live elsewhere.
But what I was driving at was using the portage profile ( which I believe is stored in /var) to just reinstall the system to where it was pre-crash. Ie, one command ( and maybe a little baby sitting) and I will have all the previous applications installed.
I'm not really proposing grafting my old /usr onto a new installation unchanged, reckong that would be a gateway to a world of pain.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Moved from Installing Gentoo.
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