Fedora 19 yum update fails "invalid data stream" -- now completely stuck

[Bob Kinney]

No one wants to take a swing at this one?

I'm totally in limbo--I cannot fix Tbird because yum is hosed.  I can't reinstall F19 because
my media is or became hosed, and the iso is hosed.  I'm pretty consistent about checking downloads and media before burning and installing, and I'm pretty sure these things were done when I 
installed F19.  I tried to download F19 again, but there were so few peers it would take forever,
so I tried to download F20 with Azureus and Transmission, and sure enough the isos are hosed.  I
tried a direct download, and you guessed it, that is hosed.  


I took my own advice and ran fsck, the drive test on my main drive, and memtest86+, and found
nothing wrong.  Despite the ups and downs with Fedora along the way, in the ten years I've been
running it exclusively, I have never become so stuck like this.  My hardware is mainstream HP
based and has been reliable as a brick.  


I would suspect malware, but I cannot find any posts of similar symptoms.  I strongly suspect
drive or filesystem problems and I'll try saving the next F20 download to a different drive.

If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.

--bobcat


Original message:


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