Zapped /etc,/bin,/dev ... how to recover user files?

[Thad P Floryan]

{Looks like PORTAL's posting-eater has been vanquished :-) }

Following is one of the strangest tales of woe I've been privy to in a long
while.  I spent several hours on the phone Friday with the person whose 3B1
succumbed to this malady.  If you ask me, with friends like this person's,
who needs enemies.  In any event ...

The BACKGROUND: the person HAS a service contract with AT&T for which
$66/month is paid.  The HotLine has also been contacted, but so far nothing
on the ticket except "reload the HD"; additional info will be at the rate of
$120/hr to speak with a technician.  Sheesh.

The SYMPTOMS: /etc, /bin and /dev on this person's system are no longer
directories, they are files.  Yes, files.  Consequently, the system doesn't
boot.

The SYSTEM: is a 3B1 (aka UNIXPC, aka PC7300)

The STORY: as related to me, this person and his alleged-UNIX-guru friend
(fiend? :-) spent an entire evening attempting to mount a floppy.  No, this
is not some kinky sex story, they were "simply" trying to figure out (without
docs?) how to tell the system a mountable floppy disk was in the floppy
drive.  Whatever they did (instead of "mount /dev/fp021 /mnt [-r]"), they
caused some extreme weirdness to occur on that person's system such that 3
directories in the root filesystem became files (/dev, /bin, /etc).

After talking to this person for awhile, I managed to convince him to boot
with the floppy boot-/filesystem-disk and look around on the HD.  There was
no way I could see to recreate a "simple" /dev directory and transfer out his
files on the serial port to another system.  Yes, it appears this person has
NOT backed up his personal files in awhile.

>From that person's description of the state of the system, my GUESS is that
somehow the superblock became clobbered; what else could so alter the state
of a directory?  From his description of the previous evening's "fun & games",
it became clear they powered-down the system multiple times without a
"shutdown" during the course of trying to mount a floppy disk.

At this stage, he's willing to re-load the system software IF he can somehow
get his personal files off safely.  I suggested he wait until I could post
this message and see if anyone else could offer other suggestions.

It seems to me that if somehow he could boot from HD he could reload the
files for /etc, /bin and /dev, but I'm at a loss as to suggest HOW.  If a new
boot floppy could be created with tool(s) to "fix" the HD to the point where
it would boot, he could get his files off onto floppies.

If anyone has ideas how to solve the above problem, please either contact me
with the info or a contact phone number so the guy can call you; he WILL be
at the AT&T Users' Group meeting this Wednesday with his machine (in case
you're in Silicon Valley).

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]