A terrible mistake with Samba. Help!

Today I was having problems with Win8 and my OMV server. Until today my OMV installation was working fine for a couple of years, including samba.

But I stupidly did:

apt-get install samba

now samba is broken, and apt-get remove samba produces the horrible warning:

The following packages will be REMOVED:

openmediavault openmediavault-forkeddaapd openmediavault-minidlna openmediavault-mysql openmediavault-omvpluginsorg
  openmediavault-processlist openmediavault-transmissionbt openmediavault-website samba

I can see that would be a very very bad thing, so I didn't proceed with the remove.

What can I do to repair the damage? The server seems ok apart from samba, but I have no idea what to do to undo my horrible stupidity...

might this be the answer?

dpkg --remove samba

Thanks for your quick responses. It was quite late when I ran into this problem. I'd been configuring 2 Windows 8 machines all day, and one of them started acting strange when accessing my samba shares. I read that this could be caused by an old version of samba, so I did the apt-get install samba without checking much, thinking that it would upgrade samba and shouldn't cause any problems.

service samba status

returns

nmbd is running.
could not access PID file for smbd ... failed!

after

/etc/init.d/samba restart

it shows the same.

find / | grep -i smbd.pid

sits for ages and doesn't show anything. at least not yet.

testparm /etc/samba/smb.conf

shows my proper smb.conf file, with just one little warning

WARNING: You have some share names that are longer than 12 characters.

After a good nights sleep I'm not so panicked, but samba's still not up..

Sadly, I'm still getting nowhere with this. log.smbd is empty, no other logs show anything useful. I still get

service samba status


nmbd is running.
could not access PID file for smbd ... failed!

and

pgrep -l mbd


446 smbd
637 smbd
1338 smbd
1598 smbd
1874 smbd
3099 smbd
3708 smbd
4260 smbd
4490 smbd
5506 smbd
6476 smbd
6478 smbd
6841 smbd
7356 smbd
7545 smbd
8894 smbd
9766 smbd
9819 smbd
10260 smbd
11217 smbd
11689 smbd
12265 smbd
12688 smbd
12795 smbd
13117 smbd
13572 smbd
13583 smbd
13913 smbd
13969 smbd
14173 smbd
14335 smbd
14456 smbd
14567 smbd
14636 smbd
14798 smbd
14906 nmbd
14983 smbd
15146 smbd
15152 smbd
15262 smbd
15268 smbd
15376 smbd
15688 smbd
15797 smbd
15911 smbd
16212 smbd
16219 smbd
16331 smbd
16452 smbd
16492 smbd
16772 smbd
16891 smbd
16934 smbd
17046 smbd
17154 smbd
17317 smbd
17422 smbd
17428 smbd
17696 smbd
18033 smbd
18268 smbd
18379 smbd
18621 smbd
19041 smbd
20030 smbd
20517 smbd
20725 smbd
21733 smbd
22474 smbd
22568 smbd
22755 smbd
23117 smbd
28364 smbd
28789 smbd
31720 smbd

I didn't find the process, how ever I did find lots of processes with status -D (disabled, deep sleep), which I could not kill, no matter what technique I used. There were also lots of locked files (listed using the sambastatus command, I think).

What started all these problems was a decision to make my laptop my work/music computer, with my desktop becoming my HTPC. This involved upgrading both machines to Windows 8, as I want to use windows games and possibly SteamOS on the HTPC. Anyway, this meant moving a lot of files around, and I was using my OMV server as a middle-man. That all went fine until I tried to move my biggest 'work' folder to the server. The mapped server drive kept going offline, and after I lost patience with that happening, I tried upgrading samba.

In the end this spells the end of my use of OMV. I became disillusioned with it a while ago when I realised how outdated the kernel was, and how non-standard the whole thing is. This could be the root of my problem because at some point I changed the kernel and installed some backports packages. I'm no Linux expert, but I was led to understand at the time that there were some risks in doing that.

When I decided I wanted a NAS, I started with Freenas, which I found extremely unreliable, so moved to OMV, which has - on the whole - served me well for 2+ years. But, as my linux skills have improved I've felt more confident about setting up a vanilla Debian server. To that end I already had an installation ready. These samba problems precipitated the move away from OMV. So yesterday I removed the OMV disk and replaced it with the Debian 7 one, with all the services I want already set up. After some mounting and samba config with webmin my server is now back up. Now all I have to do is properly configure all my other services..

So, this is goodbye from me to OMV Thanks to everyone involved there for all the hard work. I'm pretty sure I donated at some point