Fedora 19 yum update fails "invalid data stream"

[Bob Kinney]

I am having problems with Firefox and Thunderbird (Tbird crashed hard the other day), and I thought I'd run yum update (auto-notification is pretty flaky in Mate) before reinstalling both of them.  It seems that yum is broken also.  I keep getting the following message:



[root at otis yumsql]# yum update
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
Error: Error reading from file /var/cache/yum/i386/19/fedora/7d2ba134eec4ce0666a37d68c1e600decc6ba64da7de9b89205d412bfea29e2e-primary.sqlite.bz2: invalid data stream
[root at otis yumsql]# 

I have tried "yum clean all" several times.

Not
wanting to kung-fu the problem on my own, and thinking perhaps something is hopelessly sick in my installation, I attempted to reinstall F19.  

Anaconda dies at the
configuration screen, showing a similar "invalid data stream" error.

I am guessing that somehow these bz2 files are corrupted in the mirrors, but I have not seen any other users complaining about this.  I would imagine that if there was a systemic problem it would have been fixed by now.  

Using "bzip2 -tvv" on the file named above gives strange results.  It reports CRC errors most of the time, but in different places in the file, and sometimes reports "ok."  This makes me suspect filesystem or drive problems, but then why do I have the problem in anaconda?  I've ruled out FS problems already.

The system has been stable until the Tbird meltdown, and seems to run fine (although Solitaire [sol] crashed for the first time last night), but I'm perplexed by the seemingly unrelated failures that ultimately are preventing me from installing from scratch.

My next sanity checks are my internet connection and
my hard disk drive.  I'm wide open to suggestions.

Regards,

--cat