The pacman database was in /var so there's little point in trying to reinstall the same packages
What about software updates, security fixes, etc? ;-)
What is the less pain method to get it again up and running? The problem I see are pacman list of installed packages?
Although you don't know what packaged you had (/var lost), you may use /usr/bin/pkgfile to determine what package a file belongs to, e.g. % pkgfile /usr/lib/liblink-grammar.so extra/link-grammar Run this across all the files in /usr, /etc and others, and you have a list of the packages that need to be installed again. Note: you need pkgfile, which means you need it from pacman, which means you need to pacstrap. Daniel wrote how to do it. -- Kind regards, Damian Nowak StratusHost www.AtlasHost.eu