Alright if anyone wants to play god and work miracles i'm down.
So, i was given the task of making a script that found files that are older than 6 months, zipped them and then deleted them. On my way in making tihs script i ran this :
find / -type f -mtime -400 ! -mtime -180 | xargs gzip blablabla
And that gave EVERY SINGLE FILE a .gz extension. Now i undid it as soon as i noticed but it was kinda too late. Upon completion of the command none of my bash commands would work because the $PATH variable emptied itself. I tried lots of things before realising what was the problem.
So ater unzipping everything i'm still unable to boot. I've managed to make it to grub rescue, after wich i followed online instructions for :
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vml[...]
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.im[...]
After wich my linux partially boots but gives me the following errors :
Begin : Running /scripts/init-bottom ... mount : mounting /dev on /root/dev failed : No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys/ on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed : No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have requrested /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init= bootarg.
I've tried repairing the filesystem, i've booted from 3 different LiveCDs/ Rescue disks, i ran boot-repair from 2 different dicsc. I did force fscks…
I'm really out of ideas and i NEED to get this server to at least boot so i can recover my SQL databases. I'm desperate for help, i'll even pay if need be.
I've been lurking forums for 3 days straight all day to find a possible solution and i'm still at the same point… Help please?
Best Answer
This will depend on whether the filesystems are repaired enough for you to be able to mount those partitions from a LiveCD. Don't bother trying to boot the system yet. First, mount the partitions and unzip all the .gz files. This will give you working copies of init and system binaries. Then you can use grub to repair the boot sector. Then boot to single user mode and fsck the filesystem again. If that works, you'll have a running system. You'll also have a bunch of unzipped files (like man pages) that really should be zipped, but it's better than having an unbootable system.
If you can't mount the partitions from a LiveCD, then you are unfortunately out of luck. Nothing will recover your system at that point.