Another clue: I copied a binary file from the system drive to another, and on each drive
to a local subfolder. cmp is reporting differences in all of them. What the hell is going
on? Is this thing crazy or possessed?
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@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@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
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