How to deal with Git “Could not read” error

Question

I am getting this error in my git repository:

22:09:15 $ git status
# On branch master
error: Could not read 8124cc15c63be92d534e4cdfa33c38d54deee122
error:          


        

Answer 1

I got a similar error in my Homebrew install’s Git repository. Rather than restoring all the missing objects one by one, I found it easier to simply delete the .git directory and create it again by re-cloning from Homebrew’s public repository. These were my steps:

• Check what information you have in your Git repository that you won’t get by just re-cloning. For me, it was private branches, stashes, and remotes.
  • Convert stashes into real commits by creating a new branch, applying the stash, and committing with something like “[WIP]” in the name to show that it’s a stash.
  • Save branches that are not on the public remote by pushing them to a remote of your own. This could be fork of the repository on GitHub, or just a new Git repository in a different location on your machine.
  • If you have more than one remote, save the output of git remote -v, which contains the names and URLs of your remotes, so you can manually add them back later.
• Delete your repoistory’s .git directory (or rename it to .git-broken and delete it later). On the command-line, this is rm -rf .git.
• Re-clone the remote directory with git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew.git or whatever URI.
• This will have created a new sub-folder homebrew named after the repository. You want just the .git directory from that; your local files are already okay. So mv homebrew/.git .git, and then delete the homebrew folder.
• Your Git repository should have no errors, since you recreated it from scratch. Now just restore any information you saved in the first step.
  • If you had additional remotes, add them again with git remote add .
  • If you backed up any branches (or stashes converted to branches) to a remote repository, pull them from that repository to your local repository.
  • If you want, you can convert the stash-branches back to stashes by rolling the “[WIP]” commit with git reset HEAD^ and saving the working directory to a stash again with git stash save .

If you run git fsck, you should see no errors:

$ git fsck
Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done.
Checking objects: 100% (197135/197135), done.
Checking connectivity: 197162, done.
$

And git stash list, git branch, and git remote -v should show the same output as before.