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.
:w! in a :Gstatus (from fugitive.vim). This answer saved me a lot of hair pulling.
erase /s .git\index, I needed a erase .git\index.lock too.
git reset --keep instead? In the Tower Git Cheat Sheet it is explained as: Reset your HEAD pointer to a previous commit and preserve uncommitted local changes
git reset --keep is safer form of git reset --hard; git reset --mixed doesn't touch workdir at all.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.
Since the above solutions left me with continued problems, I used this dull solution:
Did the trick. Btw, I did a sed on the project root as @hobs guessed. Learned my lesson.
Use this if you want to keep your last changed files
rm -f .git/index
git read-tree HEAD
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.
This issue is occoured due to changes in git file or brach. Then you need to run this command on your cmd.
After run 2 commands your Git Repo is working well
git reset --hard deletes any changes that you had in your stagingNone 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/<name_of_tree>/index
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 had the same error and attempted to fix it as described in the accepted answer. However, immediately after resetting my index in .git/index it became corrupted again.
The problem was, that I was using git bisect yesterday to find a bug, but forgot to run git bisect reset to clean up afterwards at the end of the day. Today as I started making changes git got confused, as it was still in bisect mode and I was attempting to apply changes. I also couldn't just run git bisect reset, because there were already changes.
To fix this problem run the following in the git bash in your root directory:
git stash -m <message>
git bisect reset # You are now most likely in detached head mode
git checkout <branch>
git stash apply # If you have multiple stashes, make sure
to apply the correct one
Note that there is no need to remove .git/index and reset the index in this case!
Do the following steps.
git resetWhen this happened to me due to a BSOD during a git push, I tried rm -f .git/index, followed by git reset, but that made git think all the binaries on the branch were untracked
Solution: re-clone and manually copy your changes over onto the new clone (eg Winmerge)
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
You can also try for restore to previous version of the file (if you are using windows os)
