Issues after an improper shutdown

Support
1

Hi everyone,

After an improper shutdown caused by a battery drain yesterday, I’ve been having persistent issues with the pacman package manager and this update, specifically related to the extra database. Here’s a summary of the symptoms and what I’ve tried so far:

Symptoms:

  • When running pacman, I repeatedly get the error:

    error: could not read db 'extra' (Damaged tar archive (bad header checksum))
warning: haskell-filepattern: unknown key ...

  • These errors are followed by issues with package resolution, most notably:

    warning: cannot resolve "nvidia-utils=570.144", a dependency of "lib32-nvidia-utils"
:: The following package cannot be upgraded due to unresolvable dependencies:
      lib32-nvidia-utils

  • Also seeing some warnings like:

    dependency cycle detected: libcap will be installed before its systemd-libs dependency

What I’ve Tried:

  1. Basic system update:

    sudo pacman -Syu

  2. Forced refresh:

    sudo pacman -Syyu

  3. Manually removing corrupted database and re-syncing:

    sudo rm -f /var/lib/pacman/sync/extra.*
sudo pacman -Syy

  4. Refreshing keyrings:

    sudo pacman -Syy archlinux-keyring manjaro-keyring

  5. Clearing package cache and trying again:

    sudo pacman -Scc
sudo pacman -Syu

Background Context:

  • Yesterday my laptop powered off improperly due to full battery discharge.

  • Suspecting file system damage, I booted into a live USB and ran GParted’s file system check on my root and var partitions.

  • It found and repaired errors in /var.

At this point, I’m unsure whether:

  • The pacman sync database is still damaged and not properly refreshing,

  • There’s a mismatch between the nvidia-utils and lib32-nvidia-utils versions in the repo,

  • Or some deeper issue remains in the file system.

2

In future please post the full output as well as the commands. Little snippets aren’t always helpful, useful information is often missed out.

Have you tried refreshing your mirrorlist?

nvidia-utils 570.144 is in extra and lib32-nivida-utils is in multilib, so this is probably because the extra db is damaged. Or your mirror might not be up-to-date (see above).

Not a problem, the package manager is doing it’s job.

2 Likes
3

Hey @dmt — thanks a ton for your help!

Refreshing the mirrorlist did the trick.
After updating it, everything worked perfectly — pacman ran without errors and the system updated smoothly.

Really appreciate the quick and spot-on advice. I’ll make sure to post full outputs next time too — point taken :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks again!

2 Likes
4

You’re welcome, happy to help. :smiley:

5

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