my rpm DB just ate itself

[Randy Wyatt]

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 ?