/ 2004-07-28 10:48:32 +0200 \ Miguel Albuquerque:

Hi,

My nightmare : one of our programmers accidently has "chown (as root) * -R". Hardware problems shuted down the box during the night and this morning the machine won't boot. I had tried several things :

1. normal reboot does an normal fs repair, then it hangs on "unable to mount /proc - only root can do that". The next reboot will eventually pass this phase but will stop on "init : runlevel 6 respawn too fast disabling for 5 minztes" and again and again.

2. boot in rescue mode - can't mount file system, anywhere (i figured now that HD devices are in RAID mode).

What should i do. I am not that experienced with RAID and although i can handle an rescue environement this situation is above my skill i fear.

Help will be much appreciated.

try this: at the lilo/grub boot promt, say init=/bin/sash (which is the stand alone shell, much functionality statically linked in.) bash will do, too (maybe). then, mount -o remount,rw / mount the other parts of the system ... to get at least some of the permissions and ownders right again, try rpm -qa | xargs rpm --setperms --setugids now, at least what is listed in the rpm db should be "back to normal". for real users, you can only "guess" what belongs to them. chown them their home directories, and hope for the best. lge

Thanks everybody, i was able to restore permissions and have a normal reboot using rpm -qa | xargs rpm --setperms --setugids after remounting root rw. It returns an error but worked for me ! Best regards, Miguel On Wednesday 28 July 2004 11:26, Lars Ellenberg wrote:

/ 2004-07-28 10:48:32 +0200

\ Miguel Albuquerque:

...

Hi,

My nightmare : one of our programmers accidently has "chown (as root) * -R". Hardware problems shuted down the box during the night and this morning the machine won't boot. I had tried several things :

1. normal reboot does an normal fs repair, then it hangs on "unable to mount /proc - only root can do that". The next reboot will eventually pass this phase but will stop on "init : runlevel 6 respawn too fast disabling for 5 minztes" and again and again.

2. boot in rescue mode - can't mount file system, anywhere (i figured now that HD devices are in RAID mode).

What should i do. I am not that experienced with RAID and although i can handle an rescue environement this situation is above my skill i fear.

Help will be much appreciated.

try this: at the lilo/grub boot promt, say init=/bin/sash (which is the stand alone shell, much functionality statically linked in.) bash will do, too (maybe).

then, mount -o remount,rw / mount the other parts of the system ... to get at least some of the permissions and ownders right again, try rpm -qa | xargs rpm --setperms --setugids

now, at least what is listed in the rpm db should be "back to normal". for real users, you can only "guess" what belongs to them. chown them their home directories, and hope for the best.

lge