I am getting an error when trying to restore a svn repository taken from another machine. The error is
svnadmin: Dump stream contains a malformed header (with no ':') at
The dump was created on a subversion 1.5 server and I am loading to a new subversion 1.6 server. I was able to load several other repositories successfully to the new server. The new server is VisualSVN Server.
Try to cleanup your dump first
grep --binary-files=text -v '^* Dumped revision' ./repository.dump > ./repository.clear-dump
then try to load the new clean dump
svnadmin load /new/path/to/your/repository < ./repository.clear-dump
grep --binary-files=text -v '^* Dumped revision' mydumpfile.txt | svnadmin load mynewrepo. Don't forget to create a repository by svnadmin create mynewrepo.as far as I know (I cannot see the dump..), this happens by piping the stdout and stderr into the dumpfile.
So you should dump again and only take stdout into your dump file.
Did you see the output while dumping the repository("*Dumped revision 10", "*Dumped Revision 11" ..etc)?
I had the same problem.
I wanted to import a dump file created on a Linux Box. The file has been "tar" and gzipped.
My file was a "tar.gz"
I used Winzip to uncompressed it and I couldn't upload it using cygwin.
Then I used cygwin command tar -xvzf to unzip it and I was able to load it into my new repository.
I wanted to add. I had the same problem as Luc M. My svnadmin load REPO_PATH < file.svn command just would not work, the error was cryptic, I could not work it out. So I tried using tar.exe from my Cygwin install again on the tar file that I had and presto it worked. I also had a tar file that had been zipped, but I used WinZip to extract the TAR and I think that corrupted it.
I've had the same message recently, and in the end, it happened that I had transferred SVN dumps by FTP without explicitly asking for binary transfers, so the dumps had been transferred in ASCII format. Since the FTP server was a Windows machine, the dumps had been corrupted with Windows line ends. Therefore, my recommendation is the following: check your line ends. Hope this helps at least a little.
