1st. Thanks in advance.
This is somewhat like # 216697: Reinstalling packages with missing/corrupt files except in that person's situation, after recovery, the system still worked. Mine does not. Can't start X, no networking, systemd doesn't have all it's requirements so services can't start, etc etc. The system, to use the technical term, is hosed. (Fedora 26 i686)
DNF has an --installroot command, and if I boot to a LiveUSB OS, I can mount my root filesystem partition and do dnf --installroot=/run/media/liveuser/sda6/ repolist and it does list all my configured repos. I further try dnf --installroot=/run/media/liveuser/sda6/ list --all and hundreds of package names scroll past. I am assuming the DNF db or rpmdb or whatever (I really don't know, sorry) seems intact.
While DNF allows me to work with the non-running system, I can't figure out how to use RPM -V on a non-running system. It seems to only deal with the live OS. I assume I can chroot trick it, but don't want to risk messing up anything so I'm asking and googling madly, trying to find a solution to just verify the install and only force reinstall the corrupted packages, but am coming up empty.
As a last resort, I'm going to use dnf --installroot={path} reinstall * but that will incur many hours of time and a many gigabytes to be wastefully downloaded. At least it can happen unattended. Alternatively I could keep using the liveOS and wait another week or two and install Fedora 27 over my disabled system when it's released, but that seems just as big a cop-out as force reinstalling every package. I really would love to learn how to do this.
RPM Ninjas: HELP!
alien
and then simply boot with some media and extract the tar files. – ivanivan Sep 27 '17 at 22:49