How I restored accidentally deleted /etc directory from backups Hi-Last night I did it.

After probably 5 years of using linux, I managed to acciden tally delete my /etc directory. Here's what worked for me--ymmv--it took me a co uple of hours to figure out what to do, but if you do these steps it should be l ots shorter for you: 1. I started out with a fairly up to date backup of my /etc directory--it was ab out 2 weeks old. These I make automatically with a cron job using rsync. 2. Place live CD in the drive. (I am running 8.04.1.) 3. Ctrl-alt-delete would not restart the system. Had to manually pull the power and restart. 4. Started live CD in safe graphics mode (I have dual screen using nvidia, and u sing the standard mode gave me a screen that was unreadable). 5. Went to terminal and created mountpoints: sudo mkdir /media/main sudo mkdir /media/sdb1 6. sudo gedit /etc/fstab, and copied the mount lines for these two hard drives f rom the backup files I had, one character at a time. 7. sudo mount -a 8. rsync -av /media/sdb1/route/to/etc/ /media/main/etc (Note the trailing / on the source only.) 9. sudo reboot 10. removed live cd when it ejected. I then seemed to be back in business. The only glitch I found--firefox would not start. Tried it from command line and got "Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9.0.1 and 1.9.0.*." I fixed this with: sudo xulrunner-1.9 --register-global I do not guarantee this will work in your situation, but I thought it might be u seful to others in the same predicament--or me if I do it again!