>>> I have managed to get my system into a state where make simply refuses
>>> to build anything at all.  Most of the time it won't find source files
>>> that are in the same directory, or /usr/include, even though they
>>> exist.

>>When I got into this state I had no ld.so but a working one in the compile
>>directory. Copied that in place, as well as all other ld stuff. Then in
>>/usr/src/usr.bin/make the new make was not functional ...

>  Wouldn't this be Yet Another Reason to have a backup root&usr
>partition that one can boot from?  For awhile, I had an
>80MB wd0h partition on my hard drive with copies of / and /usr,
>so that in case disaster struck, I could boot off of
>wd(0,h)/netbsd and do damage control with a full, working
>(albeit not-quite-current) NetBSD system.  Like a
>disaster-control floppy, but bigger.  :)  

Yes, this would be an excellent reason to have a backup root & usr.
And, in fact, until recently, I had a 1.6GB IDE hard drive with a
backup root/usr, which I successfully used once before in such an
emergency situation.  Fortunately, it picked a couple weeks ago, right
after I compiled almost current, to develop a nasty aversion to
spinning.  Cheap IDE crap.

>  Of course, such a partition would need to be below the 528MB
>limit for it to be bootable, at least on i386.

Not if you only have emergency boot/root/usr on it.  I have
successfully used this technique for years: all SCSI system for the
operational drives, and an IDE drive that is normally "disabled" in
the BIOS, which has an emergency boot/root/usr on it.  This assumes
that your mostly idle IDE drive doesn't die more often than your
regularly in-use SCSI drives.  Cheap IDE crap. :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
      Contract software development for Windows NT, Windows 95 and Unix.
             Windows NT and Unix server development in C++ and C.

        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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