Gentlefolk: I was almost through upgrading to Potato when my hard drive decided to develop some flaky sectors. Courtesy of Mr. Murphy, they were on my /var partition, in /var/lib/dpkg/status* (the more recent versions).
I've rebuilt /var, mostly, on a different spindle (/var was the only partition on the bad spindle): I'd backed up /var before starting the upgrade, and most of /var is readable, with a bit of hassle. It's just that I can't get .../status back, and dpkg balks at not having it :-). Is there some way to rebuild the contents of `status' based on what's on the system? If so, how? Is there some easier way out of this fix? Thanks for any answers you my provide. Best wishes, Max Hyre