Power outage, database won't start

I am running Oracle 9i on Solaris 9 and recently had a terrible experience of physically having to pull the plug on the machine to restart it. You ask why? I blame it on having a mere 384 MB of RAM and trying to run oemapp console.

Here's the deal:

This is a testbed, and there was no data in any of the tables at all. I restarted the computer, Oracle loaded, but did not mount and open the database called "CONTACTS." I forced it to do a "Shutdown Abort," then attempted to restart it.

Big problems...

Normally Oracle takes ~45 seconds to mount the database and shows some output of what it is doing... "Database mounted, database blah blah, Total SGA 239,000,000 bytes, CONTACTS warm started."

For some odd reason, Oracle doesn't do all the connect and mount statements--it just says "Database CONTACTS warm started." And it does it in <2 seconds, which probably means *nothing* is happening.

OK, so i try to log in using:

$sqlplus /nolog

"Error, not connected"

I'll admit that I'm new to this whole Oracle DBA stuff, but I will also tell you that I've been doing a lot of research on this problem. I though Oracle's little slogan was "Unbreakable."

Ok, to make things a little hairier, when I try to run dbca and select the "delete database" option (so that I can start over) the immpressive graphical UI won't do anything when I click OK. I also can't even create a new database. Every time I click "Finish" it just sits there...

I'm basically looking for tips, suggestions, work-arounds, etc. Yes, I've already RTFM. It doesn't say jack about my problem.

Thanks all in advance for your kind help, I think I'll start making backup images of the Oracle mount drives...

Thanks,

John Kozak Received on Thu Mar 14 2002 - 10:02:05 CST