In a slim install, you're unlikely to have lost much due to the nature of /var (only variable data, aka no "installed files"). If you had a database on disk you did lose that, eg postgres. Also firewall rules and all logs. Try pacman -Ql | grep /var to see what owns stuff in there. J. Leclanche On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 10:22 AM, Marek Otahal wrote:

Hello,

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? The problem I see are pacman list of installed packages? Any other notes on what important things could be missing?

Thank you very much for any help, Mark

PS: no backups :-/

-- Marek Otahal :o)

It might actually be easier to reinstall than to go through "pacmanning" everything that's been lost, individually. Sent from my iPhone

On 3 Apr 2014, at 10:28, Martti Kühne wrote:

Or better, check with the command that tests all packages' files for presence.

# pacman -Qk | grep -v '0 missing files'

cheers! mar77i

Am 03.04.2014 11:28, schrieb Martti Kühne:

Or better, check with the command that tests all packages' files for presence.

# pacman -Qk | grep -v '0 missing files'

LOL. Where do you think that information is stored? I'll give you a subtle hint: It's /var. OP is basically screwed. There is no easy way to get his stuff back into working order. There is not even an easy way to determine which packages have been installed.

On 03/04/14 05:22 AM, Marek Otahal wrote:

Hello,

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? The problem I see are pacman list of installed packages? Any other notes on what important things could be missing?

Thank you very much for any help, Mark

PS: no backups :-/

You can install a fresh install on top of the old install by using `pacstrap`. I would boot up a live cd, move /etc to /etc_old, then remove all other top levels directories other than /home, and install again with pacstrap. The pacman database was in /var so there's little point in trying to reinstall the same packages, and it doesn't seem very important anyway - you'll remember what you used when it's missing, and it's trivial to install it again.

On 03/04/14 01:36 PM, Nowaker wrote:

...

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? ;-)

Which is why I'm suggesting a reinstall with pacstrap.

...

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.

You won't have a list of which ones are explicit vs. implicit though. IMO there's not much harm in simply reinstalling base along with the packages are actually wanted. If nothing else, it's an involuntary spring cleaning.

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:12 PM, Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:

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

Good idea. But just a little correction, use `sort` or else `uniq` will not work properly: find /usr/bin -type f -exec pkgfile '{}' ';' | sort | uniq -- Rodrigo

...

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