DBVERIFY

DBVERIFY is an Oracle utility for verifying the structure in data files when you experiences ORA-01578 / ORA-08103 or any other kind of corrupt messages.

During a database recovery, I gor error from creating control file:

ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed
ORA-01565: error in identifying file
'/t10/app/oracle/oradata/lawtest/lawts_accons_ptn_idx_7_1.dbf'
ORA-27041: unable to open file
IBM AIX RISC System/6000 Error: 5: I/O error
Additional information: 2

DBVERIFY provided great evidence to System Admin that the copy of some datafiles is a bad copy by OS command, bacause DBVERIFY showed no error on other files:

$ dbv file=lawts_accons_ptn_idx_7_1.dbf blocksize=16384
DBVERIFY: Release 9.2.0.6.0 - Production on Sun Apr 27 15:03:36 2008
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.
DBV-00100: Specified FILE (lawts_accons_ptn_idx_7_1.dbf) not accessible

$ dbv file=lawts_acbudhdr_ptn_idx_max_1.dbf blocksize=16384
DBVERIFY: Release 9.2.0.6.0 - Production on Sun Apr 27 15:04:11 2008
Copyright (c) 1982, 2002, Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.
DBVERIFY - Verification starting : FILE = lawts_acbudhdr_ptn_idx_max_1.dbf
DBVERIFY - Verification complete

Total Pages Examined : 16384
Total Pages Processed (Data) : 0
Total Pages Failing (Data) : 0
Total Pages Processed (Index): 9996
Total Pages Failing (Index): 0
Total Pages Processed (Other): 120
Total Pages Processed (Seg) : 0
Total Pages Failing (Seg) : 0
Total Pages Empty : 6268
Total Pages Marked Corrupt : 0
Total Pages Influx : 0
Highest block SCN : 36435995208 (8.2076256840)

Blocksize is specified by parameter DB_BLOCK_SIZE and is necessary in running DBV.

If ASM storage is used, we need to specify USERID to get authenticated on ASM Instance. The below script will get lines for running DBV on all datafiles of a database on ASM:
select 'dbv file=' || name || ' blocksize='|| block_size || ' USERID=sys/&SYS_PASSWORD logfile=' ||
substr(name, instr(name, '/', -1, 1) +1) || '.' || file# || '.log'
from v$datafile;