on 1-8-2009 3:55 PM Brian Lynch spake the following:

I have a CentOS 5.2 i386 Development server that has a rpm db problem that I can't seem to solve.

I have followed all the advice on Daniel Berrange's page on rpm db recovery:

http://people.redhat.com/berrange/notes/rpmrecovery.html

With no results, all I get from "rpm -qa" is list of two public gpg keys that are listed in the file system root.

My question is where do I start to recover from this? Do I reinstall rpm? So far rpm refuses to do so (using any of the command line options and combination of options), I could do it with a tar command from source rpm file, or is that asking for more trouble?

Looking for feedback on ideas to recover this system, it had a nasty crash with the install of new kernel that fixed the plusxen kernel problem in early December and I'm trying to get it back on its feet again.

If you want the whole blow by blow account you can find it at this posting in the CentOS forum:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=18006&forum=3...

Thank You In Advance for any advice you may be able to give,

---

Brian Lynch

Sometimes it just can't be fixed, and requires a full backup and re-install to fix some issues. Not the help you wanted to hear, I'm sure, but for the time you have spent trying to fix it, you might already be done with a re-install. Otherwise you might try the last part of the forum post on a clean install on another temporary system and copy that rpm package database back to the broken machine.