Re: Restoring Oracle Control Files

"jiggaman" <jiggamanrocks_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:5374d389.0401290647.57a63f84_at_posting.google.com...
> Howard,
>
> Thanx for your detailed reply. Good thing to know that we are
> restoring the control files correctly. As far as the command I type to
> start the recovery it is
>
> "restore database using backup controlfile until cancel"
>
> the only reason i cut it in the post was since sybrand had mentioned
> the whole command in his post. Anyhow sorry for the confusion. You
> were right about all the files being restored. When restoring the
> backup I use the overwrite option so that would overwite any files in
> the database directory. however on taking a close examination of the
> directory structure where the files are being restored i found that
> some dbf's (SYSTEM01.dbf, USER01.dbf and INDX01.dbf to be precise) had
> date stamps which not the same as the one on the other files that had
> been restored. Dont know why that happens..but then i went into
> veritas and manully restored those files one by one. after that I try
> repeat the recovry procedure as i described in my last post but as
> soon as i try to run the first command to mount the db it gives me
> this error.
>
> SVRMGR> startup mount
> ORACLE instance started.
> Total System Global Area 344438812 bytes
> Fixed Size 75804 bytes
> Variable Size 103976960 bytes
> Database Buffers 240308224 bytes
> Redo Buffers 77824 bytes
> ORA-01991: invalid password file
> 'D:\oracle\ora81E\DATABASE\PWDepitest.ORA'

Good. That's got nothing to do with anything! The fact that you found out about the missing data files is good. With that sorted, your recovery is going to be fine, I expect. If only you can get to the MOUNT state!!

I've never quite understood why the password file poses a problem when you do a control file re-create or if you do a control file restore, but it happens quite frequently, so this is not unexpected.

You simply need to re-create the password file to fix it, that's all. Either that, or tell the instance not to use one at all (but that then also means you must have a valid ORA_DBA group with appropriate memberships set up on your windows box... which you almost certainly do, but you'd have to check).

So: to re-create a password file, you use orapwd: orapwd file=d:\blah\blah\pwdepitest.ora -from the command line, that is.

To tell the instance not to bother using one at all, just set remote_login_passwordfile=NONE in the init.ora.

With either of those two things done, re-start your instance, and you should be able to get MOUNTed just fine, and recover normally thereafter. But to re-iterate, this is a quirk of re-creating control files, or restoring binary copies of them. It happens.

> as far as i know this error has something to do with the password file
> generated when the database is created. I had faced this error before
> quite some. if you think there is another reason this error message is
> coming please let me know. Meanwhile i am going to create a new
> database and then try both the backup and restore procedures on it and
> see if get the same ORA-01991 when i try to mount it.

It always depresses me unutterably when people (a) give up (b) start experimenting without diagnosing things properly first. Especially if I take the time to talk them through things just prior to the time they do (a). There is no need to create a new database: you just need to understand why you are getting errors with your existing one! It's not magic, these things can be diagnosed, and short of hitting a bug or two, there are usually ways around these them.

By the time you read this, of course, it will probably be too late. You'll have created the new database, and everything will work just fine... but you would have learnt a lot more through persisting with this one until you'd got it right!!!

Your call, of course.

Regards
HJR

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