To fix this error, all I did was this:

I opened up a console window and ran:

cd /var/cache/apt/archives

... which returned the error:

bash: cd: /var/cache/apt/archives/: No such file or directory

Ok, so I checked to see if the /var/cache/apt directory was there.

It wasn't.

So I created the /var/cache/apt directory with the following command:

sudo mkdir /var/cache/apt

And then I created the /var/cache/apt/archives directory with this command:

sudo mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives

And finally, I created the /var/cache/apt/archives/partial directory:

sudo mkdir /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

Now that those three directories were recreated, all I had to do was to clean apt-get's cache with:

sudo apt-get clean

And that did it. I was now able to run sudo apt-get update.

 

apt-get update returns error that a directory is missing

Today while running sudo apt-get update, apt-get returned the following error:

Archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial is missing.

I knew immediately why I was receiving this error. See, a few days ago, I was having some problems with low disk space. So I did what any knucklehead would do - I erased everything in the /var/cache directory!

No fear, a simple google search would easily find the solution to this dilemma. Without fixing this problem, I would no longer be able to update my system with apt-get.