On Aug 3, 2007, at 11:35 AM, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
Hopefully, its not /. Anything else you can 'fix' by doing a backup, going single-user, unmount the partition, remake the filesystem, mount it, and restore the backup, then shutdown back to multi-user.
You can do the same thing with / if you boot off a live CD. I've done plenty of dump/restore operations after booting a live CD or even a boot/root floppy...
In some ways / is easier because it's usually not very big, unless you've installed everything into it. With other filesystems just finding somewhere to put the backup is often difficult. I've been known to resort to piping the output of dump over an 8-bit-clean SSH connection to another system, and 'cat'ing it to a file on the other end. :)