#How can I recover debian?

[John ffitch]

Sorry that this is off topic but I cannot find out where to ask....


My 32bit sebian system is in a mess; not sure how it got like this but I
cannot installfixes or anything.

transcript is from apt-get

......
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 125455 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace base-files 7.1wheezy4 (using
.../base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement base-files ...

At this stage it just hangs -- I have waited hours or minutes but always I
see

# ps ax | grep dpk
7141 pts/1 Ds+ 0:02 /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 17 --unpack
--auto-deconfigure /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb
7148 pts/1 S+ 0:00 dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb
7149 pts/1 Z+ 0:00 [dpkg-deb] <defunct>
7150 pts/1 S+ 0:00 dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile /var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_7.1wheezy5_i386.deb

The defunct process is always there.

How do I get back to sanity? On or off list...please as thisis getting to
me

==John ff

[Pascal Hambourg]

Hello,

Post by John ffitch
Sorry that this is off topic but I cannot find out where to ask....

What about the debian-user list ?

[Michael]

I would probably start with a complete downgrade by sources.lst (that is, to stable if it was testing, or testing if it was unstable) and i'd check the harddisk next (smartmon tools)

well it should be solved anyway, meanwhile...