fatal: Reference has invalid format: 'refs/stash 2' (128)

Question

I am a new solo developer working on my first iOS app. I'm using Git for Mac to backup my progress and it's my first time using Git.

I'm developing the app across 2 laptops.

I also saved my Xcode project in my iCloud folder so that they would be synchronized across both macs.

Everything was working fine for the first 2 months, but I've come across this error on Git for Mac and I can no longer sync to Git nor revert to an older commit.

This is the error:

fatal: Reference has invalid format: 'refs/stash 2' (128)

My guess is that an iCloud synchronization error happened between my macs and that messed up Git.

All I would like to do is be able to fix git so that I can recover my last working commit and then I will remove my project from iCloud to prevent this error from happening again.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

View the tree which is under your .git folder:
tree .git and check to see if you actually have this ref in your git filesystem.

If you want to reset your data (if you can) do git reset HEAD --hard it will reset your current branch to the latest commit.

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Some other solutions you can try as well

Make a backup of your repository since the following commands are irreversible.

Search for the conflicted files and delete them
find . -type f -name "* conflicted copy*" -exec rm -f {} \\;

lastly, remove any "conflicted" references from git's packed-refs file
awk '!/conflicted/' .git/packed-refs > temp && mv temp .git/packed-refs

Also take a look here (where the conflicts file may be in):

.git/logs/refs/remotes/origin/
.git/logs/refs/heads/
.git/refs/remotes/origin/
.git/refs/heads/

Hope it will help you fix the problem.