Quote Originally Posted by davey23uk
because he has a cold backup of a database and you know full well he wants to copy those onto the new os and make them work without doing anything.

Now he didnt mention which version so lets not get into rman conversions etc etc
I guess I was looking for a more in depth answer other than cold back up..

You still didn't answer the "why" part. Skip the rman conversions. etc...

Here is my version of the "why" .... Its because the two platforms have different endianness. Plain and simple, so the block structures are differently formatted and would not be portable. Now if one knew the block structures, new which attributes were binary encoded big E vs little E, then a conversion could theoretically take place.

Now in his case Solaris and HPUX are both big endian systems.

I'm curious now, so I'll build and test his question later today.