I have been running Ubuntu 12.04 for the past few weeks. I recently tried to download and install some files through the Update Manager. It located a few files, downloaded them, but then failed to install them. It gave the error:
installArchives() failed: (Reading database ...
(Reading database ... 80%
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
reading files list for package 'libasn1-8-heimdal': Input/output error
I tried using apt-get upgrade
but a similar error was produced:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
icedtea-6-jre-cacao icedtea-6-jre-jamvm openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless
openjdk-6-jre-lib
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/34.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,024 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... 80%
dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
reading files list for package 'libasn1-8-heimdal': Input/output error
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Edit: Here's some extra information that may be useful. My original problem was that the Ubuntu Software Centre would not open. I found that the Update Manager and Synaptic Package Manager also failed to open. They all gave an error along the lines of:
"installArchives() failed: dpkg: error: reading package info file '/var/lib/dpkg/available': Input/output errorError in function:"
After much googling I seemed to fix that problem as the package managers would open again. When I then tried to download and install any updates from the Update Manager I got the error at the beginning of this post.