frecover errors

[Tony Knight]

Im getting the following errors when trying to restore Oracle datafiles from my production system to my test system. Can some help. By the way, I did not delete the current data but I made sure there was at least 20% of space above and beyond the amount that there was on the production system.

1048 I/0 error in write of file sapdata/btabd_3.data3

1045 error in trailer recovery
1001 file trailer does not match file header

vxfs: mesg 001 vx_nospace-/dev/vg01/lv012 file system full (1 block extent)

[Andy Monks]

Sounds like Oracle has 'sparse' files. These are files with holes in it. However, when you recover the files it fills the holes in.

Try frecover with the '-s' option.

And as a quick explaination of sparse files, try the following :-

dd if=/etc/hosts of=/tmp/bigfile1 bs=1k seek=10000

Then do 'll bigfile1' and 'du -k bigfile1' and see the difference.

The do 'cp bigfile1 bigfile2' and run the ll and du commands on both files to see what happened.

[Tony Knight]

I should have cleared the filesystems first. The filesystems on production did not contain the same information as the filesystems in the staging system.
Thanks for your reply.

[Ed Ulfers]

As a Senior Oracle DBA, I have seen this before...
The Oracle instance puts some OS file locks on the HP filesystem that are not being released. You can verify this by doing a "bdf" after clearing the space and it reports the original space still there.
Best solution is to free the space required, PROPERLY stop/start all Oracle instances on that filesystem so that it releases these locks (user locks can be viewed with "fuser" on the filesystem). Alternatively a reboot will also guarantee that these application locks on the filesystem are freed.

Hope this helps.

[Ed Ulfers]

As a Senior Oracle DBA, I have seen this before...
The Oracle instance puts some OS file locks on the HP filesystem that are not being released. You can verify this by doing a "bdf" after clearing the space and it reports the original space still there.
Best solution is to free the space required, PROPERLY stop/start all Oracle instances on that filesystem so that it releases these locks (user locks can be viewed with "fuser" on the filesystem). Alternatively a reboot will also guarantee that these application locks on the filesystem are freed.

Hope this helps.