hard drive mount points damaged - reinstall to fix?

[Dave Banning]

I have two systems. One system is version 4.0 and the other 4.8S.

I took the drive out of the 4.8 machine and mounted the slices with
the 4.0 machine. After the initial mount, which worked, I got
errors on subsequent mount attempts. 
It actually puts the 4.0 machine into panic whenever I try now.

Since that time I have tried to put the 4.8 drive back into it's home 
machine, but it will not boot. This led me to booting from the cdrom 
version (4.0 as this is the newest I have) and attempting to reinstall,
hoping that whatever went bad, would be overwritten new, leaving the
non-system data that I want, untouched. The cdrom-install wants
to use the existing /dev entries to reinstall system files, but since
those entries are bad, the install fails.

Is there a way to overwrite the /dev entries and mount points on the damaged
drive, reinstall system files, but still preserve my user data?

I have much of this backed up, but it will take a long time to install
a new system and copy all the data back and reconfigure it.



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