From: Holger Hellmuth Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:07:19 GMT Subject: Re: Bug? Git checkout fails with a wrong error message Message-ID: <4F1404E7.9040805@ira.uka.de> In-Reply-To: <4F128AD0.5020101@unclassified.de> On 15.01.2012 09:14, Yves Goergen wrote: > On 13.01.2012 20:28 CE(S)T, Holger Hellmuth wrote: >> Is it possible that Visual Studio changes them while you are comitting? > > No. Those files may only be modified while open. > >>> I renamed the file and created a new one with the same name. Is it so >>> simple to crash the Git repository? >> >> Who said anything about crash? git simply doesn't care whether a change >> is because of a rename. It isn't special or different to any change you >> can make to a file > > Well, there is a tracked file about which Git says it's untracked. How > would you describe such internal inconsistency? Maybe corruption would > fit better. The original point I was trying to make was that git rename is made out of the rather simple operations git add and git rm . Not a seldom used function but the basic operations of the vcs. It must be one heck of a corner case or a bit flip in the hardware. The most likely place where the corruption could be is the index. This is actually a simple file located in .git\ that can be recreated by deleting that file and doing "git reset". I would shut down tortoise-git (i.e. the explorer) before doing this and use the command line.