It happened to me today during lengthy experiments on Debian, it was accidentally deleted: / var / lib / dpkg / status . As a result, apt-get and dpkg and synaptic and all that is associated with upgrading and upgrading the system broke. Here I decided to describe the method of restoring status, suddenly someone come in handy. To restore / var / lib / dpkg / status you need to copy the file /var/backups/aptitude.pkgstates.0 to the directory - / var / lib / dpkg / status : cp /var/backups/aptitude.pkgstates.0 / var / lib / dpkg / After that, rename the copied file to status and that's it, the problem is solved.
ps This solution, of course, does not pretend to be the best, in any case, having been busy for almost a whole day, I found this solution.If you leave in the comments another solution to this problem will be glad.