Crash recovery is not working, any ideas?

We have an Oracle server (7.3.4.0.0) on an NT box that was performing a crash recovery this morning and wasn't successful. This is a snippet of messages in the alert log file:

Thu Sep 20 10:43:34 2001
alter database "oracle" mount exclusive
Thu Sep 20 10:43:35 2001

LGWR started
Thu Sep 20 10:43:35 2001

SNP0 started
CKPT started
Thu Sep 20 10:43:35 2001
Successful mount of redo thread 1.
Thu Sep 20 10:43:35 2001
Completed: alter database "oracle" mount exclusive Thu Sep 20 10:43:35 2001
alter database "oracle" open
Beginning crash recovery of 1 threads
Recovery of Online Redo Log: Thread 1 Group 2 Seq 6213 Reading mem 0   Mem# 0 errs 0: C:\ORANT\DATABASE\LOG3ORCL.ORA   Mem# 1 errs 0: C:\ORANT\DATABASE\LOG4ORCL.ORA ORA-1172 signalled during: alter database "oracle" open...

We looked up the error message for 1172 and it tells us to recover the datafile that contains that block.

OK, here's the hard part. None of us here are Oracle DBA's and we've been winging it with this box with no serious problems until now. We really need someone to point out to us how to recover from this error.

We tried going into the Recovery manager tool but were unable to do anything in there and we were uncertain as to what we should be doing. The other tools we tried required us to login which failed because Oracle isn't up and running. We have a limited understanding of Oracle and the message for the error is telling us to do things we don't know how to do.

Help?

Nancy Holland-Johnson

Should we restore the entire machine from backup tapes? Can we somehow Received on Thu Sep 20 2001 - 12:25:15 CDT