[buug] Trapped in Upgrade Hell

[jzitt at josephzitt.com]

I seem to have gotten my system into a bizarrely hosed state. I first tried 
to upgrade the box from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 1 (I no longer recall why). 
Doing so caused it to lose all my desktop settings and no longer recognize 
the soundcard. 
 
So I gave up on that and tried to upgrade to Mandrake 9.2, having 
understood that to be relatively foolproof. It wasn't. The system now bombs 
out while trying to boot. I recall seeing several permissions errors on 
/dev. And it throws me into having to do maintenance as root when it's 
unable to do an fsck on /dev/hda2. When I go in as root, I see that /dev 
has no hda or hda2. Following what documentation I've understood, I try to 
create that with the mknod command, after which I can do the fsck. But when 
I come out of the root shell and reboot, /dev/hda2 is gone again. 
 
However, when I boot up from a Knoppix Live CD and look at what's in its 
/mnt/hda2/dev directory, I see thousands of items, as opposed to the couple 
of dozen that would show up for it under Mandrake, including  
 
knoppix at ttyp0[log]$ sudo ls -l /mnt/hda2/dev/hda* 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   0 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   1 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda1 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  10 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda10 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  11 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda11 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  12 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda12 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  13 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda13 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  14 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda14 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  15 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda15 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,  16 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda16 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   2 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda2 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   3 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda3 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   4 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda4 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   5 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda5 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   6 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda6 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   7 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda7 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   8 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda8 
brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   9 Feb 28 23:10 /mnt/hda2/dev/hda9 
knoppix at ttyp0[log]$ 
 
Does this mean that the items are there but that Mandrake refuses to see 
them, or that Knoppix is creating them but destroying them when it shuts 
down, or... uh... something else? I understand that these are, in some 
mystical way, files-but-not-files, but what that means in a practical sense 
is a complete mystery. 
 
Is there anyway to turn this back into a usable, bootable machine? I am 
well beyond frustration here, and the people I tell about this keep asking 
me why I don't just get an operating system that works. If I weren't locked 
into Linux (as far as I can understand) by having 100 GB of data on an ext3 
filesystem that other OS's can't read, I'd be sorely tempted to give up and 
get back to actually using my computer instead of having to spend all my 
time configuring, debugging, and yelling at it. 
 
Is there any further information I can provide? I am off the edge of my 
knowledge and, after 7 years of slamming my head against trying to get 
Linux systems working, quite near the edge of my patience. 

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