Re: fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD^': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

From: SZEDER Gábor <szeder@ira.uka.de>
Date: Oct 28, 2010, 13:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20101028134141.GA16149@neumann>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20101028T150254-457@post.gmane.org>

Hi Todd,

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:09:08PM +0000, Todd Wells wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> I was using GitX to prepare a commit. Something happened -- I don't 
> know what --  and suddenly my branch only had a single commit 
> in it that appears to contain all  the files in my tree. So I went to the 
> command line and did this:
> 
> $ git reset --soft HEAD^ 
> fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD^': unknown revision or path not 
> in the working tree.
> 
> When I do 'git log' in this branch, there's only one commit. Now, I 
> had many commits in this branch a few minutes ago. I really, 
> really, don't want to lose this.
> 
> What steps should I take to attempt to recover?

Take a look at 'gitk yourbranch@{1}' or 'git log yourbranch@{1}'. If it looks like your branch's lost history, then you can recover from this situation with 'git reset --hard yourbranch@{1}'.

You can read up about the details here: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#recovering-lost-changes

HtH, Gábor