Oracle 9i on SuSE 8.0: unable to attach to share memory segment, please help

Hello,
I wonder if anyone came across the same problem installing Oracle 9i under SuSE 8.0 as I’m struggling with for the 3rd day already, and could give me some advice?

The very first installation worked fine, but when I tried to install Oracle again in the different place, it keeps on giving me “unable to attach to shared memory segment”. The error persists even after the complete reinstallation of Linux.

I remember that I forgot to shutdown the database before uninstalling it the first time, so I had to kill the processes by hand.

“ORACLE_HOME” and “ORACLE_SID” are set correctly.

I tried to start the database by hand with SQL Plus; I’m able to start the instance, but when it comes to mounting it, the control files are lacking. I tried to create them with SQL Plus, but I’m probably doing something wrong, since it always returns an error, that the parameters don’t match the database configuration.

On the other hand, when I type “ipcs” to see the share memory and semaphores, there is nothing used by Oracle.

There should be something fundamentally wrong here, that the standard installation cannot proceed. What really boggles the mind is that the problem still persists even after formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Linux.

Do you have any ideas?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Roman Zhovtulya
Database Lab
Offenburg University Received on Sun Oct 06 2002 - 11:29:44 CDT