WARNING:DO NOT UPGRADE TO CORE 4

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 14:20 +0200, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 01:37:55PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, recovering from such kind of breakage is non-trivial and
>>> often impossible ...
>>
>> Is it? The repairdb page on rpm.org has always worked for me.
>> http://www.rpm.org/hintskinks/repairdb/
>
> If you're lucky you can get away with it.
>
> If you're even more lucky, the fix is to remove all gpg-key*'s from the
> db, the run rpm --rebuilddb and to re-import the gpg-keys (There had
> been a time when rpm screwed up badly on gpg-keys, some user might have
> inherited this problem from this time.)
>
> If you're even yet more lucky, an "rpm --rebuilddb" helps.
>
> If you're less lucky, your rpmdb is hosed in unrecoverable ways.
>

Even here, if you have the list of installed RPMs (see /var/log/rpmpkgs) 
and the RPMs themselves (say, all together in a directory), you should be 
able to reinitialize the db and then

 		rpm -ivh --justdb *.rpm

to repopulate it.

> And if all goes wrong the file system or the hard disk underneath are
> damaged.
>
> Except of the HW-failure case, I've seen all cases happening.
>
> Ralf
>
>
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs