How to recover/reinitialize a trashed /var partition?

[David Kreil]

Hello,

I am writing in the hope that someone can give me a hint of how to either 
recover or recreate a virgin FreeBSD /var partition in an otherwise 
(apparently) functioning system.

Probably in the process of a drive failure in our hardware raid our /var 
volume got corrupted (yeah, I know this should not happen... sigh. I now also 
understand why it is recommended having /var on a separate partition...).

I tried running fsck -y on /var after umount-ing it, which gives a 
segmentation fault (exit on signal 11) some way through the process after 
displaying

** Phase 2 - Check Pathnames
ROOT INODE UNALLOCATED
UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY

ALLOCATE? yes

CG 0: BAD MAGIC FILE NUMBER
UNEXPECTED SOFT UPDATE INCONSISTENCY

Now I wonder
 - is this beyond repair? I should much like to recover /var,
   just to be able to have a look at the /var/logs to get an idea what
   went wrong when. About 3.6GB are reported to be in use by df.
 - If I cannot recover the /var partition, what is the canonical way of
   recreating it? I suppose I can run newfs on it, but how do I create the
   necessary subdir structure with the right file-permissions? Could
   /stand/sysinstall do that?

With many thanks for your help in advance,

Yours sincerely,

David.


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Dr David Philip Kreil                 ("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._
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