Re: Broken index file - any hope?

Jonas Schneider [off-list ref] wrote:

I come from the Ruby on Rails world, where Git is now spreading like ...  
duh, something fast.
Today I sadly lost my complete .git directory, only the working copy was  
left behind.
I reconstructed the directory, but the index file seems to be corrupt,  
every command just tells me about a bad signature.
I hope the rest of the repository is intanct. If it is, is there any  
chance to restore/rebuild that index file from the rest?
I don't have an idea of the internals of git, but I know the objects are  
stored in different files, and maybe on top of that
I could rebuild the index file.

Give this a shot:

  git read-tree --reset HEAD
  git status

at worst you lose staged changes.  At best you recover the index
file.

-- 
Shawn.