You can get an error message like “The Central Inventory is Corrupted” while installing the oracle patch operation, in this case you can start the check with “inventory.xml” file like shown in this post…

In our case, we got the below error message while installing the new db patch on Oracle version 12.2.0.1 ;

Solution ;

Solution was for us;  correcting the “HOME_NAME” defination from the “inventory.xml”

Please check the inventory.xml file for possible wrong definations, then solve and repeat the process.