If I seem to be a tape recording that loops over and over, telling you the same things again and again about your problems ... it is because I cannot tell from what you post here 1) which of your various computers you are posting about in any of your threads or if you just pick a thread at random to post to, 2) usually, I have no idea what you were attempting to do procedurally that may have caused or contributed to the problem, 3) what actual commands you used that first indicated a problem 4) what the output from the problem actually was, or 5) how much of my prior recommendations were followed, or not followed, or if they had anything to do with the particular problem of the moment you are posting about.
It is frustrating for me to try to help you. It must be much more frustrating for you to report an issue and get little or no help.
When you go to your browser to report a problem here, stop! Before typing anything, please, ask yourself:
- Am I posting in the right thread?
- What was I doing on this system just before I saw this problem?
- Have I ever seen it before? If so, what was I doing then?
- Do I have enough information to be able to describe the problem clearly?
- Have I done any research to determine what might produce the error message or symptom I am seeing? If so, what did I find?
- Which of my systems was it?
- What do I need to tell forum readers about this problem, so that those who may not have read any of my other threads will understand this problem and perhaps be able to recreate it themselves?
After you type your post, BEFORE submitting it, ask yourself:
- If someone reads this who is unfamiliar with my systems, my forum threads, or me ... will they be able to help me?
If not, you have not provided enough information in your post, or you have posted in the wrong thread ... or both.
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I have no idea why it appears that +CONTENTS files are being damaged, and now, /etc/login.conf. Well on login.conf, I have an idea. Just a guess. Again.
The few symptoms you have been able to describe, so far, do not indicate any sort of hardware problem could be the cause -- those data corruptions do not manifest like this.
You commented in one of your threads on file corruptions, that a restart of an upgrade, while running from the ramdisk kernel, could be a possible operational cause. I disagree. The script just unpacks tarballs with tar(1), and a restart would merely overlay the same files. The upgrade operation does not touch /var, and does not touch /etc at all.
Now you report a problem ... and I have no idea which of your systems it was,
and it appears to be an entirely unrelated problem to the package database problem reported in this thread.
I'll guess once more. You mention sysmerge. Improper manual editing of login.conf from within sysmerge is probably the cause of your login.conf problem. I don't know this for sure, it, like most everything else I tell you about your problems, is either a wild or a slightly educated guess.
If this was caused by your edit of login.conf from within sysmerge ... to recover, all you needed was to boot the ramdisk kernel, which should have been already sitting on your boot disk, and restore /etc from the backup you should have made of it before running sysmerge. And, if you failed to take your own backup, you might still find it in the backup sysmerge made of it in /var/tmp.
You did not have to panic and purchase yet another disk drive. Extra disk drives are nice to have, but it was an unnecessary purchase.