Hello, Everyone :) When I attempt to rebuild my corrupted RPM database, following the following instructions that I got off the Red Hat 8 list: To free a stuck database; 1. Make sure there are no processes trying to access the rpm database (such as rpm, up2date, redhat-config-packages) 2. Remove the rpm lock files, rm /var/lib/rpm/__db* . Rebooting will do stages 1. & 2. automatically (2. is done in the startup scripts). In many cases these are enough to free the stuck database. If there are still problems; 3. Take a safety copy of the database, in case things go wrong. (eg. cp -r /var/lib/rpm /var/lib/rpm.copy ). 4. Try rebuilding the database (from the Packages data file) by running rpm --rebuilddb . If the database still doesn't work, and the db4-utils package was installed; 5. Run cd /var/lib/rpm; db_verify Packages . This checks the underlying data format of this file. 6. If there are errors, you can rebuild the Packages file from the good records by running cp Packages Packages.orig; db_dump Packages.orig | db_load Packages and repeat step 4. There is a good reference for this procedure at http://www.rpm.org/hintskinks/repairdb/ Michael Young I get the following result when I do step 6 (I'm omitting step five from this message, as it just proved that my RPM db was hosed: db_dump: region error detected; run recovery. db_dump: Packages-ORIG: unsupported hash version: 8 db_dump: open: Packages-ORIG: Invalid argument I also tried the instructions, almost the same as the above instructions, that Jeff Johnson from Red Hat gave: http://www.rpm.org/hintskinks/repairdb/ A quick question: I hear a lot about upgrading to the version of RPM that is at people.redhat.com/jbj/test-4.1 Would upgrading have anything to do with reparing my database? Wouldn't I just have a new version of RPM, but with a corrupt database? Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated :) Steven P. Ulrick
