system recovery

[Jonathan Horne]

ok, i trashed my system (being dumb!), and now im preparing to try to get it 
back, and my goal is to try to skip the 38 hour kde compile from ports (yes, 
i like ports, not packages).

before i burned it all down, i did make a tarball of /.  i did try to untar it 
with -C /, but it got about 5 seconds into it, hit a lib it didnt like the 
version of (must have been something *REAL* important), as the system locked 
up as hard as it could be.

so, i would like to begin by trying to skip the buildworld and buildkernel.  i 
still have my entire /usr/src directory, so could i realistically just untar 
that into /usr/src, boot to single, and proceed with mergemaster/make 
installworld'ing?

or, can someone recommend how i might use that tarball of my entire system to 
quickly get a new system up and running (all this with the assumtion that i 
have not changed any hardware configurations).  if someone has time to answer 
quickly, i would sure appreciate it.

thanks a bunch,
jonathan