my rpm DB just ate itself

[Lonni J Friedman]

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?!

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