Corrupt Page During an Archive

The message Archive detects that page is corrupt indicates that page validation failed.

During an archive, the database server validates every page before writing it to the archive device. This validation checks that the elements on the page are consistent with the expected values. When a page fails this validation, a message similar to the following is written to the online.log file:

15:06:37  Assert Failed: Archive detects that page 0xc00021 is corrupt.
15:06:37  IBM Informix Dynamic Server Version 9.40.UC1
15:06:37   Who: Session(25, informix@cronus, 67612, 1085259772)
                Thread(50, arcbackup1, 40acf758, 4)
                File: rsarcbu.c Line: 2549
15:06:37  stack trace for pid 67367 written to /tmp/af.41ad7b9
15:06:37   See Also: /tmp/af.41ad7b9

The page number is printed in hexadecimal. The format for page number is 0xCCCPPPPP where CCC represents the chunk number, and PPPPP represents the page number. For this example, the corrupted page is in chunk 0xc (12 decimal) and page 0x21 (33 decimal). The archive aborts after detecting 10 corrupt pages. The online.log file displays the full error message, including the page address, for the first 10 errors. Subsequently, only the count of the number of corrupt pages is put in to the online.log.

When you receive this message, identify which table the corrupt page belongs to by examining the output of the oncheck –pe command. To determine the extent of the corruption, execute the oncheck –cID command for that table.

A corrupt page is saved onto the backup media. During a restore, the corrupt page is returned in its corrupt form. No errors messages are written to the online.log when corrupt pages are restored, only when they are archived.