RPM Database is empty after a "rpm --rebuilddb"

Hi all,

My system is FC2 with RPM version 4.3.1 (fully updated).

Yesterday when doing a couple of "yum list something*" queries I suddenly got the following error from yum:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 30, in ?
    yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 163, in main
    (log, errorlog, filelog, conf, cmds) = parseCmdArgs(args)
  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 75, in parseCmdArgs
    conf=yumconf(configfile=yumconffile)
  File "/usr/share/yum/config.py", line 155, in __init__
    self.yumvar['releasever'] = self._getsysver()
  File "/usr/share/yum/config.py", line 291, in _getsysver
    hdr = idx.next()
StopIteration

After a little investigation I found out that this error was caused by a corrupt rpm-database. To correct this I ran "rpm --rebuilddb".
Now the rpm command does not give any errors, but unfortunately the rpm-database is now empty, e.g.:

[mnk@flanagan mnk]$ rpm -qa
[mnk@flanagan mnk]$ db_dump /var/lib/rpm/Packages
VERSION=3
format=bytevalue
type=hash
db_pagesize=4096
HEADER=END
DATA=END
[mnk@flanagan mnk]$

Yum still gives me the error shown above.

On Google I was able to find one similar incidence:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-June/msg00284.html

He was lucky/wise since he had a backup of the database ... I don't :-(

Now my questions are:
- How could this happen in the first place - a bug in RPM?
- Is there any way that I can recover the information I have lost?

/Mathias

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