A hard fault is a persistent corruption of Adaptive Server that cannot be corrected by restarting Adaptive Server. Not all hard faults are equally severe. For example, each of the following situations cause a hard fault, but the results are different:
A page that is allocated to a nonexistent table minimally reduces the available disk storage.
A table with some rows that are unreachable by a scan might return the wrong results.
A table that is linked to another table causes the query to stop.
Some hard faults can be corrected by simple actions such as truncating the affected table. Others can be corrected only by restoring the database from a backup.