From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020813 Description of problem: After the base install I did an up2date. Everything worked as expected. Today, I tried running up2date and it failed. Running rpm with --rebuilddb option shows the following error: rpmdb: /var/lib/rpm/Packages: unexpected file type or format error: cannot open Packages index I do not know how to recover and would prefer not to need to reinstall the system again. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Didn't try Additional info: I have not spent the time trying to reproduce as I was working on getting a disk ready for some of my work projects. The one other item is that I do have XFS kernel installed since I am doing things with XFS. I am currently stuck as I can not load my RPMs on the system, which is part of what I am testing right now.
If the file type of Packages has changed, you should look carefully at your disk parameters. It's very unlikely that this happened through program usage, much more likely that you have file system or disk corruption.