The rowId used in our HBase tables is not exactly composed of hex strings. It is a mix as pointed out in earlier correspondence of this thread.   \x00\x0A@E\xFFn[\x18\x9F\xD4-1447846881#524196832   The solution to this, as I was able to find, was to use the function provided by the Bytes library called toBytesBinary.   This method considers the hex representation of characters in a string and treat each of those as unit instead of breaking it further up.   Hope this helps!!   ... View more