Seriously messed up system - is there anyway back?

[Jim Cornette]

Paul F. Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> For some reason I am unable figure out, my main box has gone insane and 
> decided not to bother installing correctly a whole raft of packages from a yum
> update (despite yum reporting the had been installed correctly).
> 
> An example is that I'm having to use kde instead of gnome as gnome complains
> thus
> 
> There was an error starting the GNOME settings daemon. Some things, such as
> themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly. The Settings
> daemon restarted too many times. The last error message was: Child process did
> not give an error message, unknown failure occured. GNOME will try to restart
> the Settings Daemon next time you log in.
> 
> If I do rpm -q gnome-desktop, I'm told it's not installed. Parts of evolution
> didn't install as well as a pile of others - firefox is just saying permission
> denied for me (as me) and me as su.
> 
> I've cleaned the metafiles from yum and rebuilt the rpmdb, but all I have is a
> partially usable system.
> 
> Does anyone know of a way to rescue my machine? I don't really want to a
> reinstall if I can help it.
> 
> TTFN
> 
> Paul
> 


If you still had the yum cache, you could drop to runlevel 1 with 
selinux=0 and change to the yum development cache. Make sure there are 
no kernel rpms in the cache and run rpm -Uvh with maybe --replacepkgs 
and --replacefiles as options. For kernel rpms, the rpm -ivh should work.

I did this on my system when I encountered a problem as you described 
and it seemed to work to restore the system to a sane state.

Did you keep the previously downloaded rpms and only clear metadata as 
described above?

Jim

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