dbverify, datafile corruption, Oracle 9i R2

Oracle 9.2, Suse 8.0, physical RAM 1GB, 700M for Oracle, 1GB swap space and no other RAM consuming processes on this machine.

Dear all,
in my current project I have to set up Oracle 9.2 EE on Suse 8.0 on an ext3 system. Please bear with me, as none of the three was my choice. Installation of the software on a brand new installed suse 8.0 was sucessful, install log reported no errors. I created the database manually via sql statements. All went fine and yesterday I trashed the database with inserts to verify my initial space requirements. Oracle reported no errors, but tomorrow morning alert.log stated corrupt datablocks in the data TS (inserts were finished 10 hours ago). After that alert I run dbverify against all the datafiles and the utility found in 3 of them corrupt blocks. The datafile size ranges from 200M - 3 GB (for BLOBS), total size of db around 10GB.
After that I run e2fsck with badblock option, e2fsck found no errors on the partitions.
I decided to start from scratch, deleted the database and created it for the second time. After each adding of a tablespace (or datafile) I run dbverify against the new created files. Dbverify again reported errors (this time only 3 blocks corrupt, the first time about 15). A google search revealed that other some users with Suse 8.0 and Oracle 9.0.1 had problems with dbverify, but the underlying reason was not pointed out. There was only a suggestion that dbverirfy might be broken. Has anybody encountered similar problems?

The utilites manual
http://otn.oracle.com/docs/products/oracle9i/doc_library/release2/server.920/a96652/ch13.htm#SUTIL013 states that
<snip>
Total Pages Marked Corrupt = number of blocks for which the cache header is invalid, thereby making it impossible for DBVERIFY to identify the block type
</snip>
which I interpret as 'dbverify notices that there is something wromg in the datablock, but does not mark the datablock (mark it not as unusable for Oracle, so Oracle never writes to this block)'. Am I correct with this interpretation?
I'm aware of dbms_repair package, but the frequence and the occurence of data block corruption shortly after the installation makes me uneasy. I have never encountered data block corruption with that frequency on various 8i installations I performed.

Any suggestions are welcome
Thanks and have a nice day
Manuela Mueller Received on Wed Jun 12 2002 - 13:25:16 CDT