Migrating Oracle from Big Endian to Little Endian Platorm

Hi,
We are trying to migrate an oracle database from Sun Solaris (SunOS 5.9 Generic_118558-28 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60) to Linux 2.6.18-53.1.19.el5 #1 SMP Tue Apr 22 03:01:10 EDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux which is basically a Big Endian to Little Endian conversion.

We shutdown the source database in Solaris and took a cold backup and placed the backup on the the Linux machine. We then converted each datafiles on Linux using the following RMAN commands.

convert datafile
'/d2/oradata/iol2005d/orig/bf2007q2.dbf'
,'/d2/oradata/iol2005d/orig/bf2007q4.dbf'
,'/d2/oradata/iol2005d/orig/system01.dbf'
....

.....

db_file_name_convert ('/d2/oradata/iol2005d/orig/','/d2/oradata/iol2005d/')
from platform 'Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit)';
parallelism = 3;

All the datafiles got converted sucessfully except the system datafile which errored out. Can we not convert the system datafile from Big Endian to Little Endian?

Thanks

The more usual way to migrate corss-platform is to export all of the schemas, then import them onto the new box.

If this is failing you'll have to resort to export/import. Did RMAN return any error?

Yes export/import would work but it will take some time. We could also use transportable tablespace but we would like to see if the RMAN convert would work..As you can see from the putput listed below, normal datafiles get converted successfully. It is only the system datafile we have problems with..

Converting Non system datafile - successful

RMAN> CONVERT DATAFILE
'/d3/oradata/IOL64/custom_01.dbf'
TO PLATFORM="Linux 64-bit for AMD"
FROM PLATFORM="Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit)"
DB_FILE_NAME_CONVERT="/d3/oradata/IOL64", "/d3/oradata/IOL32";

2> 3> 4> 5>
Starting backup at 21-MAY-08
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=114 devtype=DISK
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting datafile conversion
input filename=/d3/oradata/IOL64/custom_01.dbf
converted datafile=/d3/oradata/IOL32/custom_01.dbf
channel ORA_DISK_1: datafile conversion complete, elapsed time: 00:07:16
Finished backup at 21-MAY-08

Converting Non system datafile - Erroring out

RMAN> CONVERT DATAFILE
'/d3/oradata/IOL64/system01.dbf'
TO PLATFORM="Linux 64-bit for AMD"
FROM PLATFORM="Solaris[tm] OE (64-bit)"
DB_FILE_NAME_CONVERT="/d3/oradata/IOL64", "/d3/oradata/IOL32";

2> 3> 4> 5>
Starting backup at 21-MAY-08
using target database control file instead of recovery catalog
allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1
channel ORA_DISK_1: sid=149 devtype=DISK
channel ORA_DISK_1: starting datafile conversion
input filename=/d3/oradata/IOL64/system01.dbf
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03009: failure of backup command on ORA_DISK_1 channel at 05/21/2008 10:26:46
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [ktu_format_nr-1], [0], [], [], [], [], [], []

Did you check for known problems on Metalink?