rpm db rebuild question

[t.littlefield at comcast.net]

Hello,

Since there seems to be a few RPM experts answering questions right now, perhaps one
of them can offer some advice...

My current RPM db is sooooo corrupted, it cannot rebuild itself.  The system is an
FC6 plus updates as of about 1.5 months ago.

Basically... I had set up a MythTV box, which is working fairly well.  I ran into a problem
with the record show screen, when I hit escape the myth front end would lock solid.  The GUI
just 'faded' to black.  The backend continued to run (I think) but I could not find a way to
get into the box and kill the front end.  Even an ssh into the box would fail.  It was locked hard.

The only choice I had was to power off / on.

This caused all sorts of havoc, from corrupted mythconverg tables to the previously mentioned
RPM problems.  I was able to recover the db problems after some digging.  The only thing I have
found for RPM is to run

rpm --reubuilddb

Which does run...  the end result is 121 packages in the db.  One of the files --rebuilddb pulls from
appears to have gotten pooched. (Packages perhaps, don't remember which one).  In any event,
I can no longer do a yum update on the system.

The only solution I can think of is to:

- stop mythtv
- perform a mysql dump
- backup the config files
- reinstall FC6 and mythtv
- yum update
- restore the mysql db

I've got too many shows backlogged on disk to start clean (although they are on a separate file
system).  If anyone on the list can supply a little rpm black magic to recover the packages that
are installed, I would be most appreciative.  :-)

Thanks in advance...

- Todd