Sometimes a corrupt installation package can corrupt your package management system leaving your Linux unable to install or on remove any packages (Software). Here is the message error I got from apt-get after trying to install ndas-admin for Ubuntu.

$sudo apt-get install mplayer   (or any package)
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information… Done
E: The package ndas-admin needs to be reinstalled, but I can’t find an archive for it.   (this is the error)

I tried : $ sudo apt-get install -f  , to try to fix the problem but got the same error. The only option I had was to edit the dpkg status file manually.

1. $ sudo gedit /var/lib/dpkg/status    (if you prefer you can use vi instead of gedit)
2. Locate the corrupt package, and remove the whole block of information about it and save the file. Mine looked like this:

• Package: ndas-admin
  Status: deinstall reinstreq half-configured
  Priority: extra
  Section: alien
  Installed-Size: 100
  Maintainer: root <root@ubuntu510>
  Architecture: i386
  Version: 1.0.2-24
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.4-1)
  Description: Administration toosl for XIMETA,Inc NDAS device driver for Linux operating system
   ndas-admin – This program allows the user to register/enable/disable/unregister the XIMETA NDAS hard disk.
   .
   (Converted from a rpm package by alien version 8.53.)

Fixed. Hope this helps someone else.

Technorati Tags: Fix DPKG, Linux, ndas-admin, Ubuntu

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