The Hurd is Unbreakable

So recently I broke the Hurd install so bad, that it was failing to boot, and then Debian's apt saved my bacon! For those of you who don't know, I run the Hurd on a T43 with 1.5 GB of ram. With it, I edit the Hurd wiki, read email, chat on irc, and submit patches upsteam. It works pretty swell!

Anyway, I was updating the machine, when the X lock screen turned on. When I tried to log back in...the system seemed to freeze. I assumed that the Hurd was still updating in the background, but I could not log in to verify. Normally my lock screen visually shows my keypresses, but this time it did not.

I waited for about 10 minutes or so, hoped the update was done, and then I hard shut off the machine. In hindsight, I should have tried logging in via ssh with my other laptop to shut off the Hurd machine...

Anyway, when I rebooted, I was unable to fsck the filesystem. The normal boot was interupted by "filesystem not mounted cleanly. Enter the root password or press C-D to continue." I entered the root password, and tried to

fsck.ext2 /dev/hd0s1

Well, I wasn't even able to do that! Basically, simple commands like "ls" and "echo hello" failed to work. Then the delete key failed to work. Then when I was typing, weird utf8 symbols started appearing. Things got weird! :) The Hurd's console started to do things, that I don't think it knew it could do!

Basically the T43's root filesystem was soo garbled that I couldn't fix it.

But then I had a genius idea! I booted the Hurd installer, and fsck-ed the root filesystem via the rescue option, which I am glad to say worked! Then when I tried to run the update command again, apt said something like

Bro! This computer is super borked!  What did you do!?  Try running this
magic invocation to fix it broskie!  Like for realsies!  Like now!
# apt --configure -y

So I confess. I don't know exactly what apt told me, but it told me something about my computer being really beat up. I did follow apt's advice and ran the "configure" command (I think that was the right command but I could be mis-remembering), which re-installed all essential packages. A few more updates and a "syncfs" later, and the T43 was working again!

Then I disabled the X lock screen! :)

I can't believe that the Hurd made it through all that turmoil! This thing is a beast! And stable!