Oracle Central Inventory is corrupted [10.2]

We had a linux machine having oracle client 10.2.0.1 installed on it and we were preparing to install a patch for "sqlplus".
To check "opatch" we executed "opatch lsinventory" and found below output:

$ opatch lsinventory

LsInventory Session failed: OPatch failed to locate Central Inventory.
Possible causes are:
The Central Inventory is corrupted
The oraInst.loc file specified is not valid.

OPatch failed with error code 72

According to the output "Oracle Inventory" is corrupted.
Then we check the inventory location form file "/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/oraInst.loc" which was "/oracle/base/oraInventory".
Then we executed below set of commands [under oracle user] to repaier "Oracle Inventory":

$ mv /oracle/base/oraInventory /oracle/base/oraInventory_old
$ cd /oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/oui/bin #location of OUI
$ ./runInstaller -silent -invPtrLoc "/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1/oraInst.loc" -attachHome ORACLE_HOME="/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1" ORACLE_HOME_NAME="Ora10gHome"

Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

No pre-requisite checks found in oraparam.ini, no system pre-requisite checks will be executed.
'AttachHome' was successful.

Check with opatch:
$ opatch lsinventory

Now we had "OPatch succeeded."
Thanks to http://www.oraclemasters.in/?p=412