apt broken

[David Deharbe]

Fellow Ubuntu users,

I run Ubuntu 8.04 in a virtual machine under MacOS using Sun's Virtual Box.

I had to do a hard reset and this seems to have damaged several things in my installation: first, and foremost, being the package system.

Whenever I try to run synaptic or apt-get I get the following message:

david@linuxbox:~$ sudo apt-get check
Reading package lists... Error!
E: Read error - read (5 Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.


How could I repair my installation?

Best,

David.

[ghantoos]

Did you try the following command?

sudo apt-get -f installHope this helps,

Cheers,

[David Deharbe]

Did you try the following command?

sudo apt-get -f installHope this helps,

Cheers,

Unfortunately not, I get the error message.



E: Read error - read (5 Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I should note that the file system has been compromised and fsck was run in a maintenance shell at boot time. This has probably corrupted apt's data base somehow.

David.
--

[bapoumba]

I should note that the file system has been compromised and fsck was run in a maintenance shell at boot time. This has probably corrupted apt's data base somehow.

David.
--
Hmm, do you still have the /etc/apt/sources.list file ?

[Kevbert]

Please try this in terminal:

cd /var/lib/dpkg
sudo mv status status-bad
sudo cp status-old status
sudo apt-get update
It looks like your package status file has been corrupted.

[David Deharbe]

Please try this in terminal:

cd /var/lib/dpkg
sudo mv status status-bad
sudo cp status-old status
sudo apt-get update
It looks like your package status file has been corrupted.

Thanks, that was exactly my problem. When I tried to cat the contents of the /var/lib/dpkg/status file, it gave me an I/O error. So I copied the contents of status-old over status and updated apt-get. The error message disappeared.

Thanks all for your kind help.

David.