ERROR: Expecting page 8560, got page -1 instead...

[smilingmelbourne]

Hi everyone,

I have a SAS data set read in from an original .BCP data file. It has over 400,000 observations. When I tried to do something with this data, such as Proc Means or Proc Sort, etc..., I received the following error message.

ERROR: Expecting page 8560, got page -1 instead.

ERROR: Page validation error while reading Y1999.TRADES199901.DATA.

ERROR: File Y1999.TRADES199901.DATA is damaged. I/O processing did not complete.

NOTE: The DATA step has been abnormally terminated.

NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors.

NOTE: There were 162607 observations read from the data set Y1999.TRADES199901.

I have Googled for the solution, and found one but that is not really helpful, as I don't really understand what it means.

Could you please help?

[Amir]

Hi,

As the file is being reported as damaged it might be worth trying to repair it as follows:

proc datasets lib=y1999;

  repair trades199901;

run;

Regards,

Amir.

[smilingmelbourne]

Thank you for your reply. I couldn't repair the file using your code, but I found your repair statement very useful. I've never known that before.

I have re-imported that data set using Proc Dataset rather than the usual copy and paste, and it works. So it leads me to wonder if we should always avoid the usual copy and paste as people often do when copying files among folders, especially with large data sets. We should always use Proc Datasets???

Thanks

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:

That's probably a question for Tech Support. This note

http://support.sas.com/kb/7/816.html

has 3 other references to more notes about this same error.

cynthia