Hi All,

It is true that when your brains are fried, you cannot think clearly in depth. Here is the solution, for my problem.


1. Since I was lucky, I was able to retrive the disk backups from our usual daily backups on tape. For my luck, we backup the disk backup directory to tape.

2. Issued the following commands on those disk backup sets with the status unavailable on RMAN.

change backupset available;

3. On the OS moved the files to another directory

4. Ran the cross check, this expired the backups
crosscheck backup;
crosscheck backup of archivelog all;

5. Deleted the expired backups from catalog

delete expired backups;

6. Reran the validation. Bingo, its all working.

The validation completed successfully.

So, the solution in short is that when you have the backupset marked unavailable, RMAN seem to include those sets also in its validation process, and ademantly looks for those backups for the validation.

I concern is that its going to be an issue when you go for a longterm backup policy, where you take a full backup once a month and hold them on for a long time. The way Oracle suggest that you can achieve this on 8i is by marking those backupsets unavailable. In this can, it wouldn't work well looks like at this juncture.

I'm yet to hear from Oracle, why this is happening?

Anyhow, hope this would help you all.

Thanx.
Sam