Tale of woe - failed patch install and attempted recovery

Oracle 9.2.0.1.0 on Solaris 9

Began to install patchset 9.2.0.6. Our network connection had been dodgey all day, and when we got to the point where the installer was saying to go to another session as root and run root.sh .... The server did a connection reset on me. No panic. Just before starting the patch, I had asked the SA to tar up $ORACLE_HOME. Only problem is, he misunderstood (my fault for not being more clear) and had tar'd /local/home/oracle, not the /u01/...../9.2.0 where we had $ORACLE_HOME.

Still no panic. We can either restore from TSM system backup or wipe Oracle and re-install. I feel better about the restore but the re-install looks much faster. We whack /u01/...../9.2.0 and fire up the installer. As a sanity check we looked at the 'installed products' tab and found it still thought there was stuff there. Whacked the /var/opt/oracle files. Fired up the installer, and this time it reports no products installed. Good to go.

Selected Enterprise edition, software only. Now, when it gets to the actual installation phase, it reports 'uninstalling', 'installing', 'finished', and much more quickly than I've ever seen before. Uninstalling? And when it is finished, the only directories in $ORACLE_HOME are:

oracle_at_ncens174:cd $ORACLE_HOME
oracle_at_ncens174:ls -l
total 8

drwxr-x---   2 oracle   dba          512 Oct 13 10:21 bin
drwxrwxr-x   9 oracle   dba          512 Oct 13 10:44 inventory
-rwxr-xr-x   1 oracle   dba           10 Oct 13 10:36 root.sh
drwxr-xr-x   2 oracle   dba          512 Oct 13 10:21 srvm

First question: Any ideas why we got this incomplete install, and why the installer reported 'uninstalling' after initially reporting nothing was installed?

Second question: If the install had worked as planned, I'd still be missing my password file and other contents of the dbs directory. My plan was to recover those from the TMS system backup. Thoughts?

At this point we have gone to plan B and are recovering the entire $ORACLE_HOME from the TSM backup taken the day prior to attempting to apply the patch. The SA has raised a question about rdbms/audit/ora_8989.aud. Apparently some active logging that caused the TSM backup to get spread across many tapes. ??? Received on Thu Oct 13 2005 - 12:36:41 CDT