[UUG/MLUG] WOOPS!

[Scott Greathouse <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I just gave ARC's web server a lobotamy, or so it seems. I'll tell you
the whole story, to educate the newbies (like me) and to entertain those
who will easily see where I went wrong...
All I wanted to do was upgrade KDE. So I used my Mandrake 5.3 CD, and
tried upgrading from the command line. When I got to kdebase, it told me
that I needed some Mandrake files to install it. The Mandrake files
refused to be installed, even with "--force" so I decided it would be
fine to just upgrade the whole thing, as I had done with my home system
the night before. So I needed a DOS boot disk... a fellow employee
generously offered me a Windows 98 rescue disk. Yes, this is where it
gets interesting. The Windows 98 rescue disk examined the hard drive and
noted that "Drive C:" was not a Windows partition. "Oh, well," it said,
"I'm going to write a big old stupid Microsoft thing to it anyway!" and
it proceded to do so. Then, when I tried to upgrade, the upgrade program
said that there was no kernel on my root partition, so it just couldn't
do an upgrade. I rebooted with a linux boot disk and the machine is
running quite nicely without a brain (serving up webpages, running SSH
and the whole 9-yards), but I would really like to recover the root
partition. I would also like to know how to mount a directory on my MLUG
account as an NFS drive so that I can "cp -a /home /nfsmount" thereby
keeping all of the user's stuff intact (including the httpd). I could
copy it all to a Novell machine pretty easily, but this would eliminate
the ownership information and permissions. A good explanation of what,
exactly, that Win98 rescue disk did to my poor machine might be
interesting, too.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. I'm just glad it isn't an
emergency (since the server doesn't seem to know that anything is
wrong).
Thanks,
Scott

--
Scott Greathouse
Research Coordinator
Assessment Resource Center
(573) 882-2963