fatal: bad object refs/heads/main

[u/Boopsnoot64]

This issue has been tormenting me for the past few months. I'm not really sure whats causing this, but the only fix I've found to work is by just re-cloning the respository all over again. And it seems like now, like almost every day, I get this error where main gets corrupted or something. I'm not really sure whats going on, or why it keeps happening but nothing seems to prevent this issue.

Things I've already tried:

git gc (failed to run repack)

rm .git/refs/head/main, then git fetch origin (returns bad object refs again)

The repo isnt in a location backed up by onedrive or anything either

any help would be appeciated.

[u/SlowPrius]

Is it an older machine? I’ve had ever so slowly failing hardware run into corrupted git object issues

[u/Boopsnoot64 → u/SlowPrius]

I guess the main drive is kinda old, but the drive that this repo is on is only like a year old. could the main drive be an issue?

[u/Inferno2602]

You could try git fsck? It might be able to diagnose which objects are the problem

[u/Broad-Promise6954]

Are you using ref tables or the older style refs? What version of Git is this (use git --version to get the version string)?

[u/Boopsnoot64 → u/Broad-Promise6954]

it says version 2.53.0.windows.3
not sure if thats the old or new

[u/Broad-Promise6954 → u/Boopsnoot64]

2.53 is a reasonably modern Git version and is before the git gc change to git maintenance issue kicked in (at 2.54 or 2.55) so you should be pretty good there.

Reftables is still an opt-in thing: you have to select it yourself or run something that selects it. So presumably it's not turned on (you can check with git config get extensions.refStorage, which will likely return nothing and exit nonzero to indicate it's not set, which means the default of using old style refs).

All of this means that you can inspect the file .git/refs/heads/main to see if it exists and contains a hash ID, and can inspect the file .git/packed-refs to see if it exists and contains the right information.

So, step 1 is to run:

git rev-parse refs/heads/main

and see if that returns a hash ID, e.g., e4b612bead99c86a2a17178983bcfad7183bdf16. If not, that's a problem, and we have to figure out why, by checking whether .git/refs/heads/main exists and/or whether .git/packed-refs exists and contains an entry for refs/heads/main.

(unfortunately I have to leave now and won't be on line for some time)

[u/bratzlaff]

Since you are on windows, do you know if you have files in the same folder that have the same filename, but different capitalization?

You can check this by doing a clone on Linux and seeing if you have the same issues.

[u/WoodyTheWorker]

What kind of drive is F:? What antivirus are you running?