If you ever had in mind to rm -rf /: DON’T! Even for its funny aspect, it isn’t worth doing such a stupid thing. Well I did it..At least not intentionally. I remember I was going to remove some ordinary directory and then I must have misspelled the last argument (directory name). Luckily I was able to notice the tragedy and cancel the command by ^C. F\***! What should I now?!, was my first thought. I remembered there was a dir called backups somewhere. Indeed, there was /var/backups but I wasn’t able to restore my data completely. And what about /dev ?! I knew I had to reinstall the NetBSD distribution; just to be sure everything is there. So I ran
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and hoped for the best. Finally the installation was done and I did a fresh reboot. And then it happened: BOOM!
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(for more details read this). At that moment I knew I’ve screwed it up. Apparently the init process couldn’t create the devices, since there was no MAKEDEV in /dev. I don’t have a clue how that happened. So I booted Linux, mounted the UFS partition and looked up for the MAKEDEV file. I found it in /mnt//usr/obj/destdir.amd64/dev. I tried to copy it to /mnt/dev/ but then BAM! The partition was mounted read-only. Ok, I ran
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and the kernel said there was no write support for UFS. My second F\*** YOU! was just about to enter /dev/stdout but then I tried to stay calm and search for the solution. The solution: Recompile Linux kernel with UFS write suppport enabled. I found this short tutorial (BTW: Really great howto!) and was able to enable write support for UFS. I rebooted, mounted the NetBSD partition with write support, copied MAKEDEV into /dev and rebooted again. No kernel panic anymore! I was on cloud nine!
So what did I learned during this adventure?! Think before you type! That should apply to all of us.