My /var/cache/apt/archive is now broken
and I cannot use apt.

I found that my /var partition was full (completely with 0 bite of free space)

With analysing utilities, I found that that was because of apt's caches.

It never happen when you use aptitude I guess but since some months I have been using synaptic.

I couldn't do ' aptitude clean ' because it requires some free space in /var.

In a some wrong way, I broke something in my archive directry.

Now when I tap aptitude update or something,
apt refuses it saying it is impossible because archive is broken.

You can find some useful tricks here:
http://sidux.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t-9449.html
Google is your friend.
cheers,
jdk

I think the article you taught me is a good one.
But unfortunately I cannot find any useful trick for my actual situation.

# aptitude update
E: Le répertoire d'archive /var/cache/apt/archives/partial n'existe pas.

that is to say:
E: The archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial doesn't exist.

My archive directory is broken.

I must find some way to force apt to recreate the directory.
Or I must reinstall the system ?

Anyway, thank you very much for your kind information.

Hey, I found a very simple solution here.

http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=61013

Thank you very much.

Pas de problème. Ça m'a fait plaisir (No problem, it was my pleasure). Did that solution work?
Cheers,
jdk

Hi. I'm interested in this problem, but I don't speak French(??!!) Could somebody outline what the solution actually is? Thanks.

The answer appears to be this: get root privileges and then - If I understand correctly, you just need to give APT a place to work, and creating that directory does the trick.