Help with RPM rebuilddb

[oldman]

Hello all

    After updating this morning, I checked the availability of orca with
a yum list updates.  For some reason Yum hung and 1/2 hour later it was
still running with no progress being reported at the terminal.

    I was able to kill the process (holding my breath and crossing the
fingers) by logging in as root at a tty and issuing the appropriate
commands.  Thought I was good to go until I performed the yum update of
orca and though it did update, it immediately gave me 10 pages of
garbage on the screen, followed by some error messages:

rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30977) from db->sync: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run
database recovery

I attempted to `rpm --rebuilddb` but received:

rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30977) from dbenv->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error,
run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30977)

I got similar errors with --initdb (as expected, but I had to try)


    I googled the error messages and got (as expected) a similar account
on suse, but the suggestions offered, included the use of commands I am
unfamiliar with.

Any ideas of a safe way to get rpm and yum working again?


Scott