Installed apps not showing up in Preware? Run the Emergency Reconstruction Utility 7

So you load up Preware and you notice that all (or almost all) of your Installed Packages are missing. No applications. No patches. No services. What happened? As was recently discussed on the latest Palmcast postshow, this little bug happened to our own Dieter Bohn. This is actually the result of a corrupted ipkg status file, which is what Preware uses to read which packages are installed on your device. Luckily, the amazing crew at WebOS Internals have had a solution to this with the "Emergency Reconstruction Utility". While this has been in the Preware feeds since June 2010, not many people are aware of this nifty little package and may have led many of our readers to unnecessarily Doctoring their device.

To run the Emergency Reconstruction Utility (compatible with both webOS 1.X and 2.X), just load up Preware on your device and from the main Preware homescreen, just type in "emergency" and press the Enter key to searcgh. This will give you a list of a handful of Emergency packages you can run (such as the "Emergency Patch Recovery" which will uninstall all of your patches) and find and tap on the Emergency Reconstruction Utility. Install the package and it will get your ipkg status file back in order.