[CentOS] Urgent help on replacing /var

In a moment of epic stupidity, having ran out of space on the root partition of a server due to /var chewing up the space, I added a separate drive for the purpose of mounting it as /var

To do so, I mounted the new drive as /var2, cp -R (in hindsight should had rsync to preserve attributes), deleted the original /var to free up space, edited fstab and rebooted... unsurprisingly to a fubar'd server.

The thing is it still boots, I can get into single user mode but a full init get stuck at starting the syslogger. What is the best way to rescue the server now from my own stupidity and keeping all the existing configuration and data?