Dan Roberts wrote:
Ok - something truly bad appears to have happened. Yes, I will concede that cycling the system was a bad thing - but after two hours it should have returned from the update, still I was bad.
There are indeed updates that it wants - and I went back to the site to get them, but then things continue to show up as missing. # rpm -Uvh --force rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: librpm-4.4.so is needed by rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386 librpmbuild-4.4.so is needed by rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386 librpmdb-4.4.so is needed by rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386 librpmio-4.4.so is needed by rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386 popt = 1.10.2 is needed by rpm-4.4.2-48.el5.i386
Clearly I have a pretty big hole here. Yes I have been spoiled by yum and rpm. Years ago I use to command line build, make and install everything - but dropped that habit in favor of the ease of yum.
Are there are set of core files that seem reasonable to pull and install -
You could try using rpm2cpio to get the package files back down on disk.
Download all rpms you need to the machine. Probably the 5.2 versions as others have said.
Boot rescue media, let it find & mount your partitions. run cd /mnt/sysimage rpm2cpio package.rpm > package.rpm.cpio cpio -idmv < package.rpm.cpio
Do that with rpm, rpm-libs, rpm-python, popt, whatever else seems hammered.
May not hurt much if you're at your last solution - rebuild.