I've lost both my master branch and according to GIT, my HEAD (though I could have told it that). How do I get them back?

Question

I'm not entirely sure of the steps that caused this however I have ended up without my GIT master branch.

I had a crack at fixing things using the instructions here: http://sitaramc.github.com/concepts/detached-head.html however my general ignorance of GIT may have left me in a worse pickle than I started out.

$ git branch
  first-cucumber-attempt
  notifications
* second-cucumber-attempt
  sendgrid-setup

At some point I apparently started working on a detached HEAD and now I don't know how to find my master (I feel a little like Alice right now).

Attempting to checkout master gives:

$ git checkout master
  error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.

Attempting to pull master gives:

$ git pull origin master
From github.com:petenixey/kind-advice
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.

The branch, "second_cucumber_attempt" has all of the code I want to merge into master and master is still safe on github but I can't get to it. I am thoroughly stuck.

Answer 1

The "master" in git checkout master is supposed to be a branch, which you do not have. You can checkout the remote's master and make it your own with git checkout origin/master -b master, which should also set it up as a "tracking branch".

You can see your list of remote branches with git branch -r.