A while ago one of my svn repositories became all the sudden inaccessible. It turned out that the file db/current got corrupted for some reason, leaving the repo in an inconsistent state. The file db/current in a svn repository (using the FSFS backend) contains the largest revision number and the next unique node and copy ids. Googling around I found this old message [1] explaining the problem, but not providing any satisfactory solution.
My first attempt was to dump the db using svnadmin and then load
it back. This didn’t fix the problem. Then I tried again with
svnadmin recover, to not aval.
This morning I found the solution. svnadmin recover is actually
able to restore the db/current file, but only from svn version 1.5 (I
was using ver 1.4). So after an update (thanks backports!) I
successfully managed to recover the repo. This blog post [2] is
definitely informative.
[1] http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-11/0435.shtml [2] http://www.farside.org.uk/200703/svnadmin_recover