System Recovery

[Michael ODonnell]

> my first guess would be that you mistakenly pointed K3b at your
> hard drive instead of the DVD drive.

I'd think the damage would be much worse if that were the case,
so my guess is that some b0rken kernel code (or maybe a HW
problem) corrupted some memory that happened to correspond to
metadata for /var and those bad data got written back to disk.

In my experience fsck deals well with minor damage but throws
in the towel pretty quickly when confronted with seriously
b0rken metadata.  Still, in most situations it's your only
hope, unless you want to do (or more likely, pay for) some
nasty by-hand salvage...  :-/