Database Down

I have an Oracle 8.0.5 database residing on a Windows NT operating system which uses Raid5.  The 'almost never' has happened; two disks have gone bad at the same time.  As fate would have it the 'complete' physical backup performed the day before the disks crashed (Friday, May 18) cancelled.  Of course this happened on Saturday on a weekend in which I was out of town and did not get back in until late this afternoon.

My system admin said he restored the drives on the bad disks from a physical backup created the previous Friday (May 11) and then restored the differential backup from this past Thursday (May 17).  The Archive files were also on one of the disk that went bad.  I have looked at the alert log and the hot backup executed on the Thursday prior to the Saturday crash completed successfully.  Something that does not seem right, and I'll talk with my system admin tomorrow, is that when I looked at the datafiles and archive logs he restored they were all dated May 11, the date of the complete backup.  If he applied the differential as he said, does this not add the archive logs written from May 11 through the May 17 differential backup?  According to the alert log it looks like I am missing approximately 438 logs.

I thought I would have to restore all datafiles and archive logs from the physical backup so that they would be in sync, and then 'recover' the database using the hot backup.  This would only incur minimum data loss since Saturday is a non-work day for most employees.  After reading the Backup and Recovery manual it looks like all I have to do is 'recover' the database using the hot backup.  Wouldn't it matter that the datafiles would not currently be in sync since the datafiles on the disk which did not crash were ok and not restored?  Since the hot backup would restore all the datafiles I would think it wouldn't matter.  Correct??

I would appreciate some second and third opinions.  This is my first 'live' recovery and I want to make sure as much as possible that I do what will have the least impact on data loss.  It goes without saying, but I will have a complete backup of the 'good' disks before I tackle this beast.

Thank you in advance,
Laura  Received on Wed May 23 2001 - 00:32:35 CDT