e2fsck causing apt-get warnings

[Derek Broughton]

Santanu Chatterjee wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 11:33 PM, sktsee <sktsee at tulsaconnect.com> wrote:
>> Try "sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgmime-2.0-2"
> 
> Thanks. This works. But the thing is I get similar warnings for
> more than 200 packages. I can of course write a script to identify
> those packages and run your suggested command to reinstall
> them. That would be one way to solve this.

Well, it's only one command: "sudo aptitude reinstall pkg1 pkg2 pkg3 ..."

> I was thinking if there was a way (maybe some option to a dpkg
> invocation) that will just repopulate/fix the file(s) that contain the
> file list for different installed packages. 

How are you going to safely do that _without_ reinstalling?  

> If at all possible, I would 
> like to avoid reinstalling all those 200+ packages since they are
> otherwise working fine... just dpkg seems to have 'forgotten' what
> files they contain.
> 
> Another thing I noticed was that there are several files named like
> #35754, #35854, #36747, #766145, etc. in /lost+found directory.
> Probably they have something to do with the root partition check with
> e2fsck. Is there something that can be done with these files here?

Not safely.  You've had a serious problem with your drive - and I wouldn't
rule out that it's ongoing, and that you're at imminent risk of drive
failure - and you want to stick a bandage on it and continue.

To avoid actually downloading anything, you could start by doing:

# sudo dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

but (a) that presumes that there's nothing wrong with any of those .debs (if
in fact you have any) and (b) none of them have a configuration or
post-install step that is going to overwrite anything you currently have
installed (I can't guarantee that).
-- 
derek