Backup nightmares...HELP!

I'm kind of a newbie at this, and I've encountered my first real disaster with my pants down. Lucky me.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, our machine crashed sometime early this morning (monday). When I started the machine up again, the oracle server crashed on startup. I'm running Oracle 8.0.3 on NT.

I've mounted the database without opening it, and according to the restore command, all the individual data files are fine. However, when I open the database, I'm told that the LGWR process terminated abruptly (the trace file doesn't seem to actually say anything, which is what's really driving me nuts). It appears (judging from the errors) that the database connection itself closed, which precipitated a close with the log writer and then the database writer. It appears the system is corrupted (orcl1ctrl.ora appears to be damaged). Basically, whenever I issue 'alter database open', I get an error.

Now, since the database files are apparently fine, I was wondering if I could reinstall the database from scratch and then bring the database datafiles in some fashion. I was actually planning to move the stuff to another database anyway, but is there any way o just bring the existing files into another oracle database for import/export. Better yet, is there a utility out there that'll take an oracle datafile and dump it into, say, comma-delimited fields without actually using oracle? If I could just get the data out of those files, I'd be happy. Received on Mon Jun 28 1999 - 19:43:08 CDT