hard drive mount points damaged - reinstall to fix?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Dave Banning <sky_tracker at yahoo.com> writes:

> I have two systems. One system is version 4.0 and the other 4.8S.
> 
> I took the drive out of the 4.8 machine and mounted the slices with
> the 4.0 machine. After the initial mount, which worked, I got
> errors on subsequent mount attempts. 
> It actually puts the 4.0 machine into panic whenever I try now.
> 
> Since that time I have tried to put the 4.8 drive back into it's home 
> machine, but it will not boot. This led me to booting from the cdrom 
> version (4.0 as this is the newest I have) and attempting to reinstall,
> hoping that whatever went bad, would be overwritten new, leaving the
> non-system data that I want, untouched. The cdrom-install wants
> to use the existing /dev entries to reinstall system files, but since
> those entries are bad, the install fails.
> 
> Is there a way to overwrite the /dev entries and mount points on the damaged
> drive, reinstall system files, but still preserve my user data?

I guess you could boot a fixit disk, mount your hard drive on it, and
then rebuild...