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gitfilecorruptloose

Fix Corrupted Loose Git Head in Windows

My computer shut down due to a kernal panic I lost my git repo on my virtual machine which is in Windows. When I go on .net I get the following error:

corrupted loose reference file: HEAD

I have in place a folder called .git that contains a list of my branches.

enter image description here Is there a way I can convert this back to a git entity? Or would I have to reclone the directory?

Solution

  • What you're showing in your .git directory is not a list of branches; it's the standard structure for git repo metadata. This includes a few symbolic refs, such as HEAD. When a ref is stored as a file on disk, it's called a "loose" ref, which is what I believe the error message is talking about.

    So the error seems to indicate that the file .git/HEAD is corrupt. That in itself is not hard to fix (though most git commands won't work since they won't currently recognize that this is a repo, so it will take a bit of a kludge); the bigger question, in the wake of a sudden system crash, is whether anything else is also corrupt. But as a starting point, you might try something like

    # back up .git/HEAD somewhere, just in case
echo 'ref: refs/heads/master` >.git/HEAD

    Now hopefully your repo will be recognized again. Next it would be smart to do some checks like

    git fsck

    and maybe checking if you have expected changes on expected branches.

    The most vulnerable thing would be uncommitted changes (and especially unstaged changes). But at least if the above steps go well, you can assess the damage and decide where to go from there.