I experienced a little drama with the disk on my laptop. After fixing the problem with apt-get update, the following extremely unpleasant end of the process was shining
E: Encountered a section with no Package: header E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/debian.ipacct.com_debian_dists_sid_contrib_binary-i386_Packages E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.
As usual the problem is extremely obvious /var/lib/apt/lists/debian.ipacct.com_debian_dists_sid_contrib_binary-i386 cannot be read correctly. The fix is as simple as the diagnosis of the problem itself:
rf -f /var/lib/apt/lists/*
In the end, the result is forced synchronization of apt.