Are you running -current? There are some known bugs involving multiple
disks and Quadras. Until about August, 1998, I was using a /var on a
seperate disk, and it worked great, but I can't do that anymore.

You can use "mtree" to rebuild all the required directories on your
system, but be careful. Especially avoid the "-r" option; it will
delete every file on your system that isn't in the spec! Something
like the following is done at the beginning of every "make build:"

	mtree -def /etc/mtree/NetBSD.dist -p // -u

This does not, however, make the log files required by the system
daemons. The first time you boot into multi-user, you will see a
number of messages on the console to the effect of "/var/log/messages"
not found, "/var/log/maillog not found," etc, so you just have to
"touch /var/log/messages," and so on. Perhaps someone else can suggest
a better way to use mtree to recover /var.

On Sun, 31 Jan 1999, Guy wrote:

> I seem to have lost all the files in the /var directory.
> Last week I tried to put the /var
> on a seperate disk.  I have all other file systems on an
> exteral disk, scsi.
> After adding the other disk I couldn't boot in multi user
> mode.  I would first boot single
> user and then exit from there.  So today I tried to fix that
> problem and found that contents of /var
> had disappeared.
> 
> Now the system is really hosed.  I get file system not clean
> messages for the one root and user file system.
> sd1a.  And when I run fsck and reboot the same "not clean"
> message is there again.
> 
> I can exit into multi user mode, but I get a lot of error
> messages for files not found, of course from that
> /var directory.  Also things are not working so well now: no
> X and no ppp.  What should I do in this situation?  I
> realize I'll have to reinstall some of the system.  Which
> sets do I have to install?  Or in other words, which sets
> will put the files back into the /var directory?
> 
> Also is there a way  install  the needed sets on the
> internal disk away from the bsd root/usr partion on the
> other disk using the installer program?
> thanks in advance,
> 
>                 Guy
> 
> 
>