Arch Linux

chisiyuan

Member

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 24

[solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

Hi!

I had a partition /dev/sda6 mounted as /var, and deleted /dev/sda6 in a LiveCD environment without backing up data in /var.

So, almost all pacman things (database, cache, log, etc) were lost. Now I run 'pacman -Q', it shows nothing.

But, as you know, I do have packages installed. For example, I have an executable /usr/bin/vim while pacman does not think the vim package is installed.

The problem is how to retore pacman's knowledge of whick packages are installed.

I searched the forum, only to find I am the only fool.

Any idea?

Many many thanks!

chi

Last edited by chisiyuan (2010-04-29 07:42:09)

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loafer

Member

From: the pub

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 1,772

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

I have never had to do anything like this, but the instructions below suggest it's more of a problem if you don't have the log and you may have to do a reinstall.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pac … l_database

Hopefully, someone will have an easier solution.

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Cdh

Member

Registered: 2009-02-03

Posts: 1,098

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

Maybe you can do something with pkgfile. Like make a list with all files in / , search with pkgfile which package it belongs to and do pacman -S on that things.
Or pacman --asdeps -S
...

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rwd

Member

Registered: 2009-02-08

Posts: 671

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

We all do stupid stuff like this at some point, and then you learn to make  backups.

grey

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-08-23

Posts: 679

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

I searched the forum, only to find I am the only fool.

You're not: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 22#p641222

I had a package list somewhere, which helped. Then again I didn't know about --asdeps, so I reinstalled all packages explicitely and pacman -Rs was worthless for a while.

As a first step I'd do pacman -Sy --force base.

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Xyne

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,965

Website

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

I wrote a script for this once: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=670876

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chisiyuan

Member

Registered: 2009-10-18

Posts: 24

Re: [solved]/var/lib/pacman lost, pacman has no idea what I have installed

I just did a fresh installation. It's like starting a new life.

The two things I learn from this accident are that

    a. Just like @rwd says, we should make backups
    b. We have a filelist called "files" in /var/lib/pacman/local/PACKAGE/. it would be helpful if there were the same thing in /var/lib/pacman/sync/REPO/PACKAGE/.

Anyway, Thanks  guys!

@Xyne, your script is interesting except that it's in perl which I know nothing about.

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