/var corrupted.....

[Eric Schuele]

Hello,

[Running 6.2-PRERELEASE as of Oct 30th]

My /var filesystem on my laptop died this morning.  I had just
installed/enabled gdm.  I exited my wm and the machine spontaneously
rebooted.  Upon coming back up it said there was a bad superblock and to
try the one at offset 32.  It then said that one was bad.  'newfs -N'
tells me the next alt-superblock is at 160.  fsck says to run 'fsck -b
<alt-superblk>'.  However when you do that it says -b is an unknown
option.  So so googling leads me to fsck_ufs.  Which then says there are
more "softupdate inconsistencies" than I can say yes to.  Plus some
other issues.  I suspect something is very wrong in what I'm doing...
but I'm a trooper... so I forge ahead.  :)  I eventually end up doing a
'fsck_ufs -y' on it... and it bails out giving me something like
"-73827348927342458734 BAD I=213423" many many times.  So....

I may have totally destroyed my /var filesystem at this point. So my
questions are:

1) If not... pointers on what to do next would be *greatly* appreciated.

2) If I have destroyed it what can I do at this point?  I have no full
backup of /var.  I had nothing of any real importance on there.  Some
MySQL data... but I've got that.  My package database comes to mind.
but nothing of any personal value... just stuff to keep the OS on its
feet.  So... if its gone... is there anyway to create a functional /var
filesystem that will allow me to "get back to work as usual"?  Or is my
only option a complete reinstall of everything?

Thanks,
Eric