Erase my boot partition, how I can recover my gentoo?

[victorh]

Hi I made a serious mistake, I accidentally format my boot partition, (really stupid mistake) and I'm trying to recover my Gentoo system.

The problem arised when I was upgrading a Debian system that I have in separate partitions, unfortunately I get confused and I formatted my
Gentoo boot partition, I couldn't believe it, but that's the fact.

I was thinking in installing again the whole system, but as you can imagine it'll take me some days, since I had a lot of packages compiled (including open office, etc). Besides I have a kernel running perfectly...

Since the image of my kernel is still in my root partition, I could copy again this one, but the other files that were in my boot partition I don't know how to recover them. I hope you have some advices. I'm so sad, I guess this is the hard way of learning to be more careful...

If there's no other way I'll have to install again, any advice will be helpul. Thanks

[Xaid]

Hi Victorh,

If you only lost the boot partition, then I doubt you need to reinstall your whole system, here's what in my boot parition:

[sirdilznik]

If you've already turned off your GENTOO system and can't boot back in (because of the lack of boot partition) you can start up with a livecd and chroot into your system (just like you did when you first installed gentoo) then follow Xaid's instructions to recreate the files in your boot partition. No need to reinstall the whole system.

[victorh]

Thanks Xaid and sindilznik

I did what you suggested and yep I could recover my system. I copy the bzImage, the System.map and the .config file to the boot directory again.. I emerge again grub and made some corrections.

I crossed my fingers, and yes! It boot normally and right now I'm typing from my Gentoo system...

Again thanks for your help, next time I'll be more carefull, I was already missing my Gentoo box...

[sirdilznik]

Glad everything worked out for you, victorh.
I made MUCH worse mistakes when I was first trying out Linux, it's all part of the learning process