FC4: Please help: both RPM an YUM toast on FC4. Any ideas?

[Paul Howarth]

On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 14:57 -0500, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm having a serious problem here, and I hope somebody can help.
> 
> On March 30, I upgraded to the latest version of RPM. That broke yum.
> Nobody gave me answer on how to fix it, so I downloaded:
> 
> rpm-build-4.4.1-23.i386.rpm
> rpm-devel-4.4.1-23.i386.rpm
> rpm-libs-4.4.1-23.i386.rpm
> rpm-python-4.4.1-23.i386.rpm
> rpm-4.4.1-23.i386.rpm
> 
> and did a
> 
> rpm -ivh --force rpm*.rpm

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage rpm*.rpm popt*.rpm
would have been better (popt is also part of rpm) as it would have
replaced the existing rpm packages rather than installing on top of
them.

> Well, now all I get when I type rpm anything is:
> 
> %rpm --rebuilddb
> 
> rpmdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version
> error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database 
> environment version mismatch
> error: cannot open Packages index using db3 -  (-30974)

The rpm database on your system was built using a different version of
BerkelyDB than the rpm you have installed. 

> OK. Yum and now RPM are useless. Now what?

Probably time to get your backups out. You might be able to get away
with manually extracting the contents of the latest rpm packages (use
rpm2cpio or fedora-extract from fedora-rpmdevtools) and installing them
directly on to your system to restore it to the state before you did the
"rpm -ivh --force" though.

Paul.