How to resolve "Error: bad index – Fatal: index file corrupt" when using Git
After git init, I added and committed a few files, made some changes, added and committed. Set up the git daemon (running under Cygwin on WinXP) and cloned the repository once. Now, I get this error with the cloned repository:
$ git status
error: bad index file sha1 signature
fatal: index file corrupt
Is there any way to fix this, other than getting a new copy of the repository?
If the problem is with the index as the staging area for commits (i.e. .git/index), you can simply remove the index (make a backup copy if you want), and then restore index to version in the last commit:
On OSX/Linux/Windows(With Git bash):
rm -f .git/index
git reset
On Windows (with CMD and not git bash):
del .git\index
git reset
(The reset command above is the same as git reset --mixed HEAD)
You can alternatively use lower level plumbing git read-tree instead of git reset.
If the problem is with index for packfile, you can recover it using git index-pack.
You may have accidentally corrupted the .git/index file with a sed on your project root (refactoring perhaps?) with something like:
sed -ri -e "s/$SEACHPATTERN/$REPLACEMENTTEXT/g" $(grep -Elr "$SEARCHPATERN" "$PROJECTROOT")
to avoid this in the future, just ignore binary files with your grep/sed:
sed -ri -e "s/$SEACHPATTERN/$REPLACEMENTTEXT/g" $(grep -Elr --binary-files=without-match "$SEARCHPATERN" "$PROJECTROOT")
.git/index, you can always delete it and recreate with git reset (without --hard!).
sed with something like find .git/ -type f -exec sed -i 's/Legislator/Politician/g' {} \; This might help if your .git/ is so corrupted that git reset won't work. Or maybe you want to restore your existing .git/index without deleting it. This will fail, of course, if your original code or index already had some "Legislator"s in it.
sed by replacing my new_string with my old_string!
I had that problem, and I try ti fix with this:
rm -f .git/index
git reset
BUT it did not work. The solution? For some reason I had others .git folders in sub directories. I delete those .git folders (not the principal) and git reset again. Once they were deleted, everything worked again.
This sounds like a bad clone. You could try the following to get (possibly?) more information:
git fsck --full
Since the above solutions left me with continued problems, I used this dull solution:
clone a new copy of the repo elsewhere copy the fresh .git directory into the (broken) repo that contained the changes I wanted to commit
Did the trick. Btw, I did a sed on the project root as @hobs guessed. Learned my lesson.
This worked for me. Although i'm curious of the reason I started getting the errors in the first place. When I logged out yesterday, it was fine. Log in this morning, it wasn't.
rm .git/index
git reset
Note for git submodule users - the solutions here will not work for you as-is.
Let's say you have a parent repository called dev, for example, and your submodule repository is called api.
if you are inside of api and you get the error mentioned in this question:
error: bad index file sha1 signature fatal: index file corrupt
The index file will NOT be inside of a .git folder. In fact, the .git won't even be a folder - it will will be a text document with the location of the real .git data for this repository. Likely something like this:
~/dev/api $ cat .git gitdir: ../.git/modules/api
So, instead of rm -f .git/index, you will need to do this:
rm -f ../.git/modules/api/index git reset
or, more generally,
rm -f ../.git/modules/INSERT_YOUR_REPO_NAME_HERE/index git reset
This issue can occur when there is a .git directory underneath one of the subdirectories. To fix it, check if there are other .git directories there, and remove them and try again.
None of the existing answers worked for me.
I was using worktrees, so there is no .git folder.
You'll need to go back to your main repo. Inside that, delete .git/worktrees/
Then run git reset as per other answers.
Cloning remote repo and replacing the .git folder from it to problematic local directory solved the issue.
A repo may seem corrupted if you mix different git versions.
Local repositories touched by new git versions aren't backwards-compatible with old git versions. New git repos look corrupted to old git versions (in my case git 2.28 broke repo for git 2.11).
Updating old git version may solve the problem.
I did a simple trick. I clone the repo to a new folder. Copied the .git folder from the new folder to repo's old folder, replacing .git there.
rm -f .git/index
git reset
More info at https://www.chris-shaw.com/blog/quick-fix-for-git-corrupt-index
This is ridiculous but I just have rebooted my machine (mac) and the problem was gone like it has never happened. I hate to sound like a support guy...
You can also try for restore to previous version of the file (if you are using windows os)
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:w!in a:Gstatus(from fugitive.vim). This answer saved me a lot of hair pulling.erase /s .git\index, I needed aerase .git\index.locktoo.git reset --keepinstead? In the Tower Git Cheat Sheet it is explained as: Reset your HEAD pointer to a previous commit and preserve uncommitted local changesgit reset --keepis safer form ofgit reset --hard;git reset --mixeddoesn't touch workdir at all.