Re: Am I Screwed?

here's what I would do. It sounds as if you may need to recreate your controlfile. Shutdown the database, copy the existing controlfile(s) to something else, say control.old. Hopefully you've been doing a periodic 'alter database backup controlfile to trace;' command which is simply an ascii file with syntax to recreate your controlfile. If so, you can run that script to recreate your controlfile(s). The thing to keep in mind is that if for some reason that script fails, you're in no worse of shape than you are currently. You still have your old controlfile (the ones you renamed) and your database is still offline so no harm done.

Option B would be to see if one of your controlfiles was hosed, but the other ones are good. You are multiplexing your controlfiles, right? Hopefully... So you go into your pfile and remove one of the controlfiles listed and see if your database comes up.

Other than that, I can only think of restoring and recovering the database from a backup. Best of luck.

Mark wrote:

> I am a newbie to Oracle. If someone can help me with this, I'd greatly
> appreciate it.
>
> I have a server running Oracle 8i. Yesterday we had a long power outage
> and the server went down. We are in the middle of setting up the system
> so we had no resent backup of the files, but we have an Export around 12
> o'clock, so there's not so much data that is gone.
>
> This is the error it now gives me in the log:
>
> Wed Apr 23 09:58:57 2003
> starting up 1 shared server(s) ...
> starting up 1 dispatcher(s) for network protocol
> '(ADDRESS=(PARTIAL=YES)(PROTOCOL=TCP))'...
> starting up 1 dispatcher(s) for network protocol
> '(ADDRESS=(PARTIAL=YES)(PROTOCOL=TCP))'...
> Wed Apr 23 09:58:58 2003
> alter database mount exclusive
> ***
> Corrupt block relative dba: 0x00000001 file=0. blocknum=1.
> Fractured block found during control file header read
> Data in bad block - type:21. format:2. rdba:0x00000001
> last change scn:0xffff.00000999 seq:0x1 flg:0x04
> consistancy value in tail 0x09931501
> check value in block header: 0xb04b, calculated check value: 0xa
> spare1:0x0, spare2:0x0, spare2:0x0
> ORA-214 signalled during: alter database mount exclusive...
>
> Does this mean that the Control File is messed up?
> I have a backup of the file on Apr 14, but another user was added to the
> DB after that. Does this mean that the backup is invalid?
>
> According to the Oracle 8i Backup and Recovery Guide - "Each time that a
> user adds, renames, or drops a datafile or an online redo log file from
> the database, Oracle updates the control file to reflect this physical
> structure change." - it should still be valid.
>
> Additional info:
> This is the line in init.ora for the Control Files:
> control_files = ("C:\Oracle\oradata\KSMIS\control01.ctl",
> "C:\Oracle\oradata\KSMIS\control02.ctl")
>
> Thanks for any help
> Mark

--
Phillip