We have an unusable rpmdb and wanted to know what packages were installed

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7

Issue

We have an unusable rpmdb and wanted to know what packages were installed. Is there a way to do so?

Resolution

There are data left after installation using yum in /var/lib/yum/yumdb/.

Those can be parsed to provide at least partial (e.g. in case that rpm was used directly for package management instead of yum) or in some cases even complete list of installed packages:

# find /var/lib/yum/yumdb/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 | sed 's/^[^-]*-\(.*\)-/\1./' | sort > yumdb_packages.txt

Diagnostic Steps

Each use of rpm oryum results in the following message:

error: rpmdb: BDB3037 /var/lib/rpm/Packages: file size not a multiple of the pagesize
error: cannot open Packages index using db5 - Invalid argument (22)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

Also rpmdb_verify gives errors:

# /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_verify /var/lib/rpm/Packages
rpmdb_verify: BDB3037 /var/lib/rpm/Packages: file size not a multiple of the pagesize
rpmdb_verify: BDB0536 Page 383: bad page number 98048
...
rpmdb_verify: BDB0536 Page 35920: bad page number 9195520
rpmdb_verify: /var/lib/rpm/Packages: BDB0090 DB_VERIFY_BAD: Database verification failed
BDB5105 Verification of /var/lib/rpm/Packages failed.

And so does rpmdb_dump:

# /usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_dump /var/lib/rpm/Packages
rpmdb_dump: BDB3037 /var/lib/rpm/Packages: file size not a multiple of the pagesize
rpmdb_dump: BDB5115 open: /var/lib/rpm/Packages: Invalid argument

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