How to handle git gc fatal: bad object refs/remotes/origin/HEAD error?

Question

I randomly hit this today while trying to run Git garbage collect:

$ git gc
fatal: bad object refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
error: failed to run repack
         


        

Answer 1

The problem that I ran into (which is the same problem that @Stavarengo mentioned in this comment above) is that the default remote branch (develop in my case) had been deleted, but was still referenced in .git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.

Opening .git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD in my editor showed this:

ref: refs/remotes/origin/develop

I carefully edited it to point at my new default branch and all was well:

ref: refs/remotes/origin/master

The clue that tipped me off was that running git prune showed this error:

> git prune
warning: symbolic ref is dangling: refs/remotes/origin/HEAD