You certainly have some interesting suggestions for attempts to recover...
The rpm --freshen won't work, that only upgrades existing files if they
exist. There are some options on rpm that do allow you to over install
missing packages, but they don't actively go out and look for the missing
files and replace them, they just blindly replace files you tell it to
replace.
Even if you can get all the files back, you will still have some interesting
times ahead of you. You'll need to save your current configs and then
restore them.
You can always
cp -a /etc/* /home/etc_bak
-or-
tar -czf /home/etc_bak /etc/*
To backup your etc files (and subdirs). But I will wager that most of your
setup battle was with X, and that is gone...
==
Not to start a Holy War, but here is how I lay out my personal workstation
with a 25Gb IDE drive and 96MB RAM:
\boot 50Mb P1
<swap> 192Mb P2 (=2x memory)
Extended Partition P3 (rest of drive)
\ 5Gb E5
\home 19+Gb E6
This gives me plenty of room to shoot myself in the foot if I do something
stupid, but it also lets me upgrade my kernel and keep my old kernel on
stand-by. Also if I chunk everything and re-install, then the stuff I
really care about (the pictures of my kids, my email, etc) is safely tucked
away at \home.
Tell us your HD size and your RAM, and I guarantee you'll have get more
helpful suggestions than NZ has sheep.
Good luck - Jon
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