Getting rid of '… does not point to a valid object' for an old git branch

Question

I have a fork of a Git repo and my clone appears to have an issue with an old, no longer existant, branch. I keep seeing this message:

error: refs/heads/t_1140

Answer 1

I had this issue when attempting to clone some github repositories, the system I was on was running an older version of git v1.7.4, a quick update fixed it up.

remote: Counting objects: 533, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (248/248), done.
remote: Total 533 (delta 232), reused 529 (delta 230)
Receiving objects: 100% (533/533), 121.36 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (232/232), done.
error: refs/remotes/origin/master does not point to a valid object!
verror: Trying to write ref refs/heads/master with nonexistant object 0457f3e2e9432e07a1005f0f4161dc4b8215f128
fatal: Cannot update the ref 'HEAD'.