modules.dep got deleted

[Christoph]

I just found out the hard way that my computer isn't entirely stable. After its most recent freeze, I rebooted and got several errors during the boot up. The things didn't quite work correctly (no internet access or sound) so I rebooted and started in failsafe mode. While I was booting up in failsafe mode, I noticed that most of the errors had something to do with modules.dep not being found.
Can I rebuild modules.dep?

 

[mcrites]

I think if you just run depmod, it should rebuild it for you. Maybe it was depmod -a....

 

[Christoph]

Depmod won't do anything without modules.dep, and I didn't see any options to rebuild modules.dep. Sorry I'm such a newbie at this.

 

[mcrites]

Did depmod -a work?

 

[Christoph]

Nope.

 

[mcrites]

Did it make an empty file or just do nothing? Are you running it as root?

 

[Christoph]

Did it make an empty file or just do nothing? Are you running it as root?

It didn't make an empty file. I was running as root (I couldn't access it otherwise).
I'll probably just try it with an empty file.

 

[PolyPill]

Well you can always reinstall your kernel and modules, either through the original rpm or if you compiled it just do a make modules_install

 

[Christoph]

How do I tell which modules I need to reinstall, and what are the files I need to install them? I have mandrake 8.1, so when I installed I just let the installation take care of itself (no compiling, manually installing RPMs, etc).
Also, is what you mentioned the simplest way to get my system back online? I need to have it online by Wed. to turn in my computer science 210 homework.
Thanks for your patience mcrites and PolyPill.

 

[mcrites]

Did you install the kernel from an rpm, or did you install from a tar.gz or tar.bz2?

 

[Christoph]

How do I mount the CDROM so that I can read from it?

 

[mcrites]

cd /dev
ln -s /dev/hdc cdrom
mount /cdrom /mnt/cdrom

 

[Christoph]

It says that I need to specify a file system type on the last command.

 

[mcrites]

Try mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

 

[Christoph]

That isn't working. Looks like it's too fubar for my humble skill. I'll just reinstall and make sure to read up on Linux more often. I'd much prefer to fix the existing installation, but I've got a programming assignment due in 2 days, and I need both days to do it. I realy appreciate your help, and even though I didn't fix the problem, I did learn a thing or two about Linux.

 

[Christoph]

Well, Mandrake is all reinstalled, but thanks to mcrites' instructions, I had no trouble mounting the partition that had all my old data on it!!! Looks like I've got a fresh install with all my old data intact. Great job!

 

[mcrites]

Glad I can help.