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

From: Santi Béjar <santi@agolina.net>
Date: Oct 28, 2010, 13:42 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTimbOZwHDez6iAN828AoiqL+EvAV92-WqvhP6ZpP@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20101028T150254-457@post.gmane.org>

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Todd Wells <ttopwells@gmail.com> 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?

You could try:

git log -g

which will show you the reflog, a log of recent tip commits of HEAD. You could also try to see other local branches and their reflog.

If all this fails you can:

git fsck --unreachable

that will output all the unreachable commits/objects, those not in your branches or reflogs.

Once you have the correct commit you can reset the HEAD to this commit:

git reset HEAD

(or with --hard as necessary).

HTH, Santi