My first thought was that I had corrupted the files somehow in the transfer process. I sat back and had a think about what SAPCAR actually does, and what could have gone wrong. The tool used to decompress the CAR files is SAPCAR – SAP’s own version of the. When I started decompressing the Support packs on the UNIX system, everything went OK for the BASIS (KB46Cxx.CAR) and and ABAP (KA46Cxx.CAR) Support Packs, but when I went to decompress some of the R3 Support Packages, SAPCAR failed (with a less than useful message). I transferred the latest SPAM (SAPKD00040) and the 50 Support Packs (yes, I know) required from to the UNIX server via my PC. However, when I loaded the Support Packs into the target system’s /usr/sap/trans, I couldn’t decompress them for processing via transaction SPAM.
As part of the exercise, we are bring the Support Packs (Support Stacks came in after 4.6C) up to date. Over Christmas / New year, I’ll be upgrading a customer from a very old (as in unsupported by both the vendor and SAP) release of their database to the latest release supported by 46C.
