Recovering from a corrupt DBF file

Okay -

I hosed a DBF file used for rollback segments, i.e. an rbsXX.dbf file. I corrupted it when I mistyped the "tar" command while doing an offline backup, so I obviously have no backup for the file. (I miscopied the "tar" command, actually. I was using the mouse to copy-n-paste a command and I didn't pick up part of it. That'll teach me to be sloppy.)

(This is Oracle 7.2 on Solaris 2.5.1, by the way.)

Luckily, it's just a training/eval database and doesn't contain any important data. But I want to figure out a way to fix this problem, just in case it ever happens on a "real" system.

The database seems to come up, after whining about the file it can no longer recognize, but it doesn't really. Anybody who tries to access it gets a "shutdown or initialization in progress" message, even after several hours.

Any ideas of how to recover from this without a backup? Is there a way I can get the database to come up enough to allow me to go in and drop (or otherwise remove) the affected rollback segments and then recreate them?

Failing that, if I create a brand new database that's just like this one in every way except for the data (I have a collection of scripts that do all the work) then is there a way I can use the DBF files from the corrupt database to populate the new database? Received on Sun Oct 15 2000 - 20:38:55 CDT