dpkg: serious warning: file list file for package 'package' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed - can't install any packages

[Florian Diesch]

Ryan Pugatch <rpug at tripadvisor.com> writes:

> Florian Diesch wrote:
>> Ryan Pugatch <rpug at tripadvisor.com> writes:
>> 
>>> Interesting issue.. my machine (thinkpad t61) has had an issue where the 
>>> file system would randomly become read only.  
>> 
>> That usually caused by a file system error.
>> Often things like that mean your disc is about to die.
>> 
>>> I think it has something to do with the machine going in to standby..
>>> it seems to happen shortly after waking up.  Anyway, usually after a
>>> few times of this happening I have to run fsck and then everything is
>>> back to normal.  Unfortunately, this time, it appears something was
>>> really hosed and there were a lot of unattached inodes when I ran
>>> fsck.  Everything seems fine, though, except for the part where I
>>> can't install anything with apt.  It seems that dpkg thinks that none
>>> of my packages are installed.
>>>
>>> See: http://paste.ubuntu.com/251393/
>> 
>> That looks quite bad. A lot of the *.list files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/
>> are missing so the package manager doesn't know anymore which files
>> belong to which package. 
>> 
>> Most likely there are other files missing or damaged, too.
>> 
>> 
>>> Not really sure what to do at this point.  It would be nice to make it 
>>> work again, otherwise I'll have to reload the machine which I'd like to 
>>> avoid doing.
>> 
>> I'd reinstall the system, if possible on a new disc (replacing the disc
>> is quite simple on a Thinkpad).
>> 
>
> Thanks for your advice.  If I need to reinstall, I had planned on using 
> a new disk just in case.  But I don't think that the disk is bad.  The 
> FS would only go read only when I'm working mobile and having put the 
> machine in standby.  Something definitely would get corrupted when it 
> would happen.  Is there no magic way to regenerate the *.list files? 


You can try to reinstall the damaged packages (assuming you have the
error messages from http://paste.ubuntu.com/251393/ saved as error.txt):
 sudo apt-get --reinstall install $(awk -F "[\`']" '/dpkg: serious warning/ {print $2}' errors.txt)



   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>