how to fix a nackered system by fixing every installed rpm ?

[David Timms]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> David Timms wrote:
...
> You are probably better off backing up your good config and data
> files, wiping the drive, and doing a fresh install. Treat the system
> the same way you would a cracked system. With file corruption as bad
> as you indicate, you are better off assuming that all files are
> damaged until you check them. Running rpm -Va is not going to catch
> everything. It can only check the files in the RPM database. Any
> custom configuration files will fail the test. User files, and
> generated files like menu's and passwords are not checked.
Yeah, it's more of a OK, if this happened on my main machine - would / 
could it be recovered in a reasonable time ?/? I do expect to have to do 
a full format/reinstall.

> You may want to look at using kickstart to make the install easier -
> you can generate the kickstart file on the machine you coppied the
> RPM database from.
Yeah, the other machine left a ks.cfg that I could use - thanks for the 
idea. Actually I think I saved a rpm -qa|sort recently. haven't found it 
amongst the lost+found yet.

> On another note, I am not sure what you were trying to do with the
> --rebuild option, but I suspect that it does not do what you think
> it does. It will not fix the RPM database or the installed files.
> The --rebuilddb will sometimes repair a corrupted RPM database, but
> also does not fix the installed files.
Attempted rpm commands where having an error with one of the files 
/var/lib/rpm  -this suggested a corrupted file. I understood the command 
{as corrected by yourself} would attempt to repair the rpmdb. I'll read 
more about that when I get a moment.

> If you are are going to try and fix it instead of doing a new
> install, you may want to try running something like: (NOT tested!)
> 
> for i in $(rpm -qa) ; do
>   echo Trying to fix $i.
>   rpm -i --quiet --oldpackage $i >> /tmp/fix.log
> done
> 
> If you run this in the directory with all the RPMs in it, it will
> attempt to re-install all the installed RPMs. But it will generate
> an error if there is a newer package installed then is in the
> directory,
So if I change it to -Uvh, then I think it wont try to install a second 
parallel version, but rather change the version to the one in the folder.
Also, where the package is already installed according to the rpmdb 
{broken} wouldn't --force {--oldpackage --replacefiles} be better ?

> or if the package is not in the directory. It will
> probably generate some .rpmnew and/or .rpmsave files where you have
> change the config files.
I can get the machine to do the work for me. I'll find them with 
updatedb folowed by locate *.rpmnew and locate *.rpmsave

Thanks for your tips, I'll give that a try {I'll limit it {eg: rpm -qa 
a\*} to test}.

DaveT.