my rpm DB just ate itself

[Lonni J Friedman]

On 4/16/06, Randy Wyatt <rwwyatt01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/16/06, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I upgraded from FC4 to FC5 yesterday, and its been one problem after
> > another ever since.
> >
> > Today's new problem is that the RPM database just ate itself for no
> > apparent reason.  I ran an innocent "yum search sysfsutils" command,
> > and after providing some relevant output, it finished off with:
> > rpmdb: page 949: illegal page type or format
> > rpmdb: PANIC: Invalid argument
> > rpmdb: /var/lib/rpm/Packages: pgin failed for page 949
> > error: db4 error(-30981) from dbcursor->c_get: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal
> > error, run database recovery
> > error: db4 error(-30981) from dbcursor->c_close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal
> > error, run database recovery
> > error: db4 error(-30981) from db->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error,
> > run database recovery
> > error: db4 error(-30981) from db->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error,
> > run database recovery
> > error: db4 error(-30981) from dbenv->close: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal
> > error, run database recovery
> >
> > Its been years since I've had any problems with rpm's database, so I
> > had to google a bit, and found a few different suggestions to delete
> > /var/lib/rpm/__db.* files and then run "rpm --rebuilddb".  I did that,
> > and got yet *more* errors like those above.  So this time I deleted
> > the same db files again, and this time ran "rpm --initdb" first,
> > followed by "rpm --rebuilddb" and that seemed to complete without
> > complaints.
> >
> > Unfortunately, something is still broken, as tons of RPMs that I know
> > are installed, aren't getting returned as installed.  Such as bash,
> > rpm, fedora-release.  There isn't anything else installed or running
> > on this system that touches the RPM db (no yumex, apt, etc).  I'm the
> > only person with root.
> >
> > I'm at a complete loss right now as to why this is happening and more
> > importantly how to recover.  Help?!
> >
> > --
> >
>
> Do you have a backup  of /var ?

No, I don't have any backups yet.  This is a laptop, and unfortunately
pcmcia wifi is broken too:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-April/msg03734.html

--
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L. Friedman                                    netllama at gmail.com
LlamaLand                       http://netllama.linux-sxs.org