I've lost content of /var, other partitions are ok, so system somewhat boots up (to recovery mode). What is the less pain method to get it again up and running?
If you have enough time, I would try using pkgfile to recover the installed packages. I thing something like this should suffice: # update the pkgfile database pkgfile -u # find the package names for all binaries find /usr/bin -type f -exec pkgfile '{}' ';' | uniq
I assume that the libs would be installed as depends for the programs that has a binary in /usr/bin
this seemed like a clever idea, so I gave it a try: 0. Adding -L to the 'find' helped slightly 1. For some binaries pkgfile returns a list, e.g. $ pkgfile /usr/bin/emacs extra/emacs community/emacs-nox on my system this is the case for 69 out of 2891 files under /usr/bin, with jack/jack2 and gcc/gcc-multilib responsible for 47 of that 69. So, just a bit of manual intervention is needed to select the appropriate package in these cases. 2. Some files in /usr/bin had no package that pkgfile could find. Most were from AUR, but there was also this: $ pkgfile /usr/bin/init.lxc $ pacman -Qo /usr/bin/init.lxc /usr/bin/init.lxc is owned by lxc 1:1.0.3-1 It seems the 'lxc' package installs 'init.lxc' into /usr/sbin, which symlinks to /usr/bin. Not knowing anything about how these tools work, I'm more surprised that 'pacman -Qo' figured this out, than I am that 'pkgfile' didn't. 3. Ultimately the packages that pkgfile computed from /usr/bin, along with their dependencies, represented about 94% of the packages on my system. The missing packages (listed below) were mostly: dependencies for things I've installed outside of pacman (e.g. AUR) gstreamer bits desktop/X-related (e.g. some fonts, themes) misc. perl modules Overall conclusion - potentially useful, and I hope I never have to deploy it in real life... Carl aspell-en docbook-xml docbook-xsl gstreamer0.10-base-plugins gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-good gtk-engine-murrine gtk-engines gvfs-smb hunspell-en lib32-gcc-libs lib32-glib lib32-glibc lib32-libstdc++5 lib32-zlib libmspack libreoffice-extension-nlpsolver libreoffice-gnome libtracker-sparql libva-intel-driver libvisual licenses linux linux-firmware linux-headers man-pages mate-icon-theme mate-themes perl-io-socket-ssl perl-lwp-protocol-https perl-mozilla-ca perl-net-ssleay perl-text-csv perl-timedate ttf-arphic-uming ttf-baekmuk ttf-hannom ttf-sazanami ttf-tibetan-machine ttf-tlwg x11-ssh-askpass xaw3d xorg-fonts-type1