11 replies to this topic

[trc773]

Hi All,

I have a problem.

I am a police officer, not a programmer. We do not have a programmer on staff. I have had very little training in Pro-IV. We have broken our relationship with our VAR. I am trying to extract data from my Pro-IV v4.6000 on a SCO UNIX platform, to give to a new vendor with a new (to us) database.

Our new vendor is reporting that many files are reporting corrupted records. In some cases 50% of the records are corrupt. At the recommendation of our former VAR, I ran the ischk utility faithfully daily. I am learning that ischk can cause problems.

I have limited access within Pro-IV. I can get to the security menu so I can give myself access to anything. I can get to the command prompt in UNIX and have generated tar files and extract them, which is how I was able to provide the new vendor with files.

My questions are:

Does ischk cause a problem?

If so, is there a way to correct or repair the problem caused by ischk?

Are 15+ years of backup tapes useless and we will lose all of our old data?

Thanks

TC

[Joseph Bove]

tc,

I'll generically because there are likely some critical details that are missing.

ischk - in and of itself will not damage a file.

However, ischk run with the -y option on a live system could damage a file.

ischk run without the -y option is basically a diagnostic that verifies the consistency of the key portions and addresses portions of a file. You can do a search on this site to find a lot of posts about ischk that go into a lot of detail.

When ischk is run on a live system, it can generate false positives because the file is "in motion".

Depending on the corruption, you should be able to extract the data. You'll find the names of a couple of tools people have used to do this by searching this forum.

If you're new vendor is not proficient in ProIV, you may want to consider hiring a ProIV consultant to review your data. If you've got 15 years worth, it's probably worthwhile to some one knowledgeable help if you are seeing a high level of corruption.

hth,

Joseph

[Chris Pepper]

DONT' PANIC!

ischk does not normally make changes or corrupt data unless it attempts to "fix" problems.

So running "ischk fred.pro" will not mess things up but if you run "ischk -y fred.pro" or answer "y" to fix if it finds problems then you MAY get problems. Thet's because it copies the data across to another copy of the file and may not be able a access all the data. You'd probably notice in the application if you were getting missing records!

Was ischk reporting problems? If so does it report them at your end?

So just running ischk will not cause problems - I would not expect this to be the problem. There may be some problem in the VAR actually reading the media or something. What errors are they getting? There are a number of possible reasons why there could be problems.

There is a "third party" tool for retreiving information from "corrupted" PRo-Isam files if all else fails.

(Joseph got there before me again!)

Edited by Chris Pepper, 11 September 2006 - 03:43 PM.

[Bob Filipiak]

I am a police officer, not a programmer.

In the event the system just will not provide what you are looking for; will you have it "arrested" for obstructing justice.


Sorry - - but I just could not resist.



"""Alright computer, keys up!!!! Mouse behind your monitor"""


One other serious point in mind - you MAY have to extract your data in other ways; so check out whether or not you have file definitions and a development environment. Both would be necessary if you had to go that other route.


Bob Filipiak

[Mike Schoen]

Also, if the vendor is using a different platform, they may be byte-reversed.
Linux and hpux/aix use a different byte-ordering, and it is necessary to ischk .pro files after transfer, to byte-reverse them.
ischk will detect this, report that the files are byte-reversed and ask if you want to byte-reverse them.

[trc773]

Thank you all.

I got hold of a manual, actually read part of it, and used isout. I got most but not all of the file I needed most urgently. I can recreate the missing records.

As a side note, several of my co-workers have informed me I am not a police officer any more, I have become a well-armed, overweight clerk typist.

Thanks again,

TC

[Donald Miller]

TC

It's a long shot - but you don't happen to be working with "Holmes" from the original Northgate (of the 80's) ?