Thanks to everyone who responded. It turns out that in AIX you have to turn on support for large files ( > 2gb ) when you create a file system. I verified that this was the problem when I tried to restore the = database from a cold backup (tar.gz) and got the same error for the same file. When sa created a new file system for me with large file support turned on, I was able to restore the file to that file system. Thanks to Mahesh Rajendran for explaining this to me. Peter Schauss -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l