"The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened" [duplicate]

Solution 1:

This is old question, but just for archive purpose... the follow was what solve this problem in my case:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update

Solution 2:

Try using an older status file,

sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/status /var/lib/dpkg/status.bad
sudo cp /var/lib/dpkg/status-old /var/lib/dpkg/status
sudo apt-get update

Solution 3:

I was running into a similar error:

Reading package lists... Error!
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

I followed similar suggestions to copy status-old.

$ head /var/lib/dpkg/status
$ head /var/lib/dpkg/status-old

All of my status files were blank for some reason. Luckily, I found out there are backups of these files:

$ ls -l /var/backups/dpkg.status.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 444620 Nov 15 06:33 /var/backups/dpkg.status.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 444620 Nov 15 06:33 /var/backups/dpkg.status.1.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 128168 Sep 20  2013 /var/backups/dpkg.status.2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 112545 Sep 16  2013 /var/backups/dpkg.status.3.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107767 Sep 14  2013 /var/backups/dpkg.status.4.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107766 Sep 11  2013 /var/backups/dpkg.status.5.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  94583 Sep 11  2013 /var/backups/dpkg.status.6.gz

I checked the latest backup...

$ head /var/backups/dpkg.status.0

...but it was still blank. So I unzipped an older one...

$ gunzip /var/backups/dpkg.status.1.gz
$ head /var/backups/dpkg.status.1

This time there was content. So I copied it...

$ cp /var/backups/dpkg.status.1 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Then apt-get update ran without problems.

Credit goes to this post.