[Techtalk] Fedora 17 yum woes (dupe packages)

[Gwen Morse]

I hadn't done an update on an older laptop in some time and set it to
update. It lost power and the battery ran down, interrupting it.

Yum (or the rpm database) now appears broken.

When I try to do any further changes or edits I get error messages
about duplicate packages. I would expect to just remove the duplicates
and reinstall them by hand, but there's several hundred duplicate
packages totalling over 3 gigs in disk space, including many that are
clearly core files to the OS.

Is this horked up beyond all repair, or is there some hope of fixing
it without resorting to a clean install?

Can I remove the older files through rpm or are the newer duplicates
not fully installed, yet?