I Prefer Jim Developer James Schubert shares his code and his thoughts.

git push: fatal: unable to read SHA1

Today, I was faced with an interesting error in a git repository. I am backing up a lot of old projects from during and after college into a private git repo. In doing so, I moved some folders around which disconnected a couple of binary files. After pushing, I received an error: unable to read [SHA1].

The fixes, in short:

$ git fsck
$ git log --raw --all --full-history | grep SHA1-HERE
$ git hash-object -w OBJECT-PATH-HERE
$ git push

Here is the error and a walk-through of coming up with the fixes above:

jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master
$ git push
Password:
Counting objects: 1945, done.
error: unable to find 2978ec4d75abb8c6bab225d8adfbd2bef064338a
error: unable to unpack bddbd13afd698e5ba7d572c9270e52bcac862661 header
error: inflateEnd: failed
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (1854/1854), done.
fatal: unable to read 2978ec4d75abb8c6bab225d8adfbd2bef064338a
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: write error: Bad file descriptor

After running git fsck, I found that I had two missing blobs:

jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master*
$ git fsck
dangling tree dbe9172996edbb7df517b0305c38891d78b72f66
dangling tree fbf7d8336b5f2347da23eb8a3938de5ab18f783c
missing blob 2978ec4d75abb8c6bab225d8adfbd2bef064338a
missing blob bddbd13afd698e5ba7d572c9270e52bcac862661

To fix this, I had to get the filenames of these blobs and write them back into the repository:

jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master*
$ git log --raw --all --full-history | grep bddbd13
:000000 100644 0000000... bddbd13... A	INFO 465/Project2/UseCase/Diagrams/Leader - Time & Mileage.vsd

jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master*
$ git log --raw --all --full-history | grep 2978ec4
:000000 100644 0000000... 2978ec4... A	INFO 465/Project2/Prototype/WebPrototype/WebPrototype/bin/WebPrototype.dll

Writing these files back into the repository, the push was successful. To write these back, do the following:

jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master
$ git hash-object -w INFO\ 465/Project2/UseCase/Diagrams/Leader\ -\ Time\ \&\ Mileage.vsd
bddbd13afd698e5ba7d572c9270e52bcac862661
jim at schubert in /media/16GB/projects/school on master
$ git hash-object -w INFO\ 465/Project2/Prototype/WebPrototype/WebPrototype/bin/WebPrototype.dll
2978ec4d75abb8c6bab225d8adfbd2bef064338a

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