Tried to symlink /etc to another disk, now stuck

[Glenn Gillis]

I think I did just about the worst thing I could do to my
organization's FreeBSD-4.11 email server today:

I was trying to free up space on the root disk and attempted to copy
the /etc directory to another disk, /new/etc, then delete and symlink
the old location to the new:

  $ sudo cp -Rp /etc /new/etc
  $ sudo rm -rd /etc/; sudo ln -s /new/etc /etc

Of course, with the sudoers file in the original /etc directory, the
first "sudo" command to remove the /etc directory disabled the second
"sudo" command's ability to run.

Now, I cannot log in as a privileged user to copy or move /new/etc
back to /etc. (Because the password files were also in /etc.) I've
tried booting into Single User mode with "boot -s" at the boot prompt,
only to receive a "mountroot>" prompt wanting to know where to find
the root filesystem. I've also tried booting from my installation
distribution, but can't get out of the installation without the
machine rebooting.

To make a long story shorter, is there any hope for getting a
privileged user account on this machine to move /etc back to where it
should be?
-- 
Glenn Gillis
ELAW U.S. Information Technology Manager
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide
http://www.elaw.org