I was recently converting a repository from SVN to Git using KDE's SVN2Git , and after the conversion was done, the repository didn't seem to work that well. Inside the bare repo, if I tried git log , I received:

fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD'

I also tried git fsck , which resulted in:

notice: HEAD points to an unborn branch (master)

After trying a few different methods to resurrect the git repository, I noticed that my SVN2Git rules file defined the name of the resulting git repository as example-example (note the dash). Removing the dash fixed the issue, and now I have a happy git repository!

tl;dr : Don't use special characters in the name of the resulting git repository in SVN2Git's rules file.