general informix wierdness

Ok. Thanks to those who offered suggestions reagrding the upgrading of databases - I probably would have had this prototyped by now if it wasn't for an unusual problem that seems to be occuring within Informix. To begin with, I had a look at hacking the results of 'dbexport' aswell as modifying the schema to perform an upgrade on a small table. UNLOAD worked perfectly on the table and the ascii (as I say) could either be hacked or we could use DBLOAD with a suitable schema update to upgrade the database. HOWEVER, when I tried to dbexport the whole database, we got a seg. fault and a core dump. So, after a sharp intake of breath I tried to UNLOAD the tables manually. This worked for the 'small' tables but on our larger tables isql returns with: Unknown error message 0. Ug, we think, that looks bad. Calling Informix leads us down various avenues. The error is tracked down to a 'unrecognised message from OS', apparently. Now we try a 'tbcheck -cD' on the offending database and it returns a whole host of errors, i.e.: TBLSpace data check for pedb:blah.tl_ey_cg BAD PAGE 109480: pg_stamp 1268966 != PG_STAMP2 100008446 BAD PAGE 0: pg_addr 0 != bp->bf_pagenum 109481 Informix tell us that this could be a disk error, low level problem with the surface. Of course this is on a raw partition so we can't check it. They suggest using a cooked file - but this is really no good to us as we USE RAW PARTITIONS. So, in an attempt to locate the problem we start afresh with a new table. Fresh. Add a hundred rows at a time and perform a tbcheck inbetween. Leave this to run for a bit. Everything is fine and then suddenly the table develops errors as above. WARNING: Bit-Map has wrong bits set for page 1a7 (bitmap c should be 8) BAD PAGE 1095c0: pg_stamp 1273428 != PG_STAMP2 100008446 BAD PAGE 0: pg_addr 0 != bp->bf_pagenum 1095c1 We wonder whether we have a configuration problem, are we set up right? Informix don't think so; we don't. We can see ALL of our data fine from all of the tables in the Database. The whole thing is at a maximum size of 200MB. Not a large DB. So now we can't UNLOAD and we can't dbexport. Does this ring any bells? TIA, Rich.