Mercurial: "abandoned transaction found - run hg recover". Recover does not work

Question

Using tortoise hg on windows, I did a pull from a repository on my local drive to a repository on a usb stick.

During the pull i guess there was a glitch in the usb-connection because it got aborted half way through.

Now i can't pull again. I get the message: abandoned transaction found - run hg recover

When i run hg recover i get the following message:

rolling back interrupted transaction
** unknown exception encountered, details follow
** report bug details to http://mercurial.selenic.com/bts/
** or [email protected]
** Python 2.6.4 (r264:75708, Oct 26 2009, 08:23:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]
** Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 1.6.3)
** Extensions loaded: fixfrozenexts
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "hg", line 36, in <module>
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 16, in run
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 34, in dispatch
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 54, in _runcatch
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 494, in _dispatch
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 355, in runcommand
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 545, in _runcommand
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 499, in checkargs
  File "mercurial\dispatch.pyo", line 492, in <lambda>
  File "mercurial\util.pyo", line 420, in check
  File "mercurial\commands.pyo", line 2869, in recover
  File "mercurial\localrepo.pyo", line 606, in recover
  File "mercurial\transaction.pyo", line 173, in rollback
ValueError: too many values to unpack

If i try to rollback manually i get this message: no rollback information available

This time i can quite easily just delete the whole backup on my stick and do a fresh pull because the repo is small and the usb-stick does not contain any other changes. But what if this happens on a larger repo where i can't afford to restart from scratch? How can i recover the repo?

Answer 1

I experienced a similar issue and reported it as a bug, and the developer on the report suggested the problem is a corrupt journal. As described in the bug report, you can run hg verify to see the last "good" commit, and use hg clone -r <#> to recover up until that commit.

Answer 2

I think this is actually a bug in the code source. You should report the error to the Mercurial team like said in the error message.