RPM Database Corruption

[Sam Varshavchik]

chris at idlelion.net writes:

> Lesson learned: *NEVER* kill a yum update, no matter how long it takes.

Come and join the party we're having in another thread.

> With that out of the way, how SHOULD I have proceeded after trashing an 
> FC5 or FC6 system that had the database so corrupt that yum and rpm 
> couldn't run?

Although the rpm database is known to get wonky from times, winding it up in 
an unusable state is very rare.  It only really happens when corruption and 
various cruft has accumulated, slowly, over some time, and your final 
"event" pushed things over the edge, over the point of no return.

Manually rm-ing all the __db* files in /var/lib/rpm, and then running "rpm 
--rebuilddb" usually manages to repair or minimize the damage, maybe about 
99% of the time.  It's the remaining 1% of the time that puts you into a 
real pickle.

> (What I eventually did was re-install Fedora.)

Been there, done that too.

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