git Index corruption

Question

For some reason my Git index file keeps on getting corrupted.

For example if I do git status I get

error: bad index file sha1 signature and fatal: index file corrupt

This has happened to me several times now. I am thinking perhaps it's something to do with my dev environment. I work on a Mac and have a VMWare Virtual Machine running Debian with Apache MySQL, PHP and Git. I use Samba to connect to the vm to edit my files in my IDE. So I am thinking it has something to do with samba? Is there a better why to connect/share the work space?

The thing is I don't know how to even recreate the problem, I tried varies things to open and close edit and close, restart and what not still no luck.

But then for no reason I am aware of suddenly I get the error again. My work around at the moment is to delete the index file .git/index and do a git reset.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Your workaround is a good one (recommended at "“Index file corrupt”").

But if samba is problematic, it would be best to get two repos:

• one on the Mac, where you can:
  • locally edit your files
  • setup a Git server (got daemon, ssh, https, ...)
• one on the VM, where you can pull from the Mac repo and update your working repo there (on the VM) in order to run your PHP site.

Answer 2

You should check this though :) do a little git reset --keep. The one @VonC recommended for!