Cloning an Oracle instance

Hi - I need to clone an Oracle instance to another, and never having done this before wanted to bounce my ideas off you guys first to see if you had any recommendations about what to do or not do!

I need to migrate all the objects from this instance, including packages, package bodies, views, etc.
I'm planning on using Export (does Export do packages?) , but not with a "full" option because I want to put the objects in the tablespaces belonging to the new instance, which will be in different directories. I was planning on creating an empty new instance first, with all needed files, then importing the stuff in. I need to retain the data in some but not all of the tables, so was planning on taking it all and then truncating what I didn't need later.
We're doing this to create a few more test databases for a product we're installing. Unfortunately the install process was so squirrely that I can't just install fresh, as there is no real good "canned" install process to follow. The vendor put on patch after patch after patch after the base install scripts were run. Ugh....

Any ideas, warnings, etc that you have would be greatly appreciated..... Received on Wed Sep 08 1999 - 19:02:54 CDT