Re: ORACLE installing by copying ?

In article <42c22b$a30_at_mail.boku.ac.at>

           klima_at_donau.boku.ac.at "Gerald Klima" writes:

:
: I tried the following:
: 1. Shutting down the database
: 2. Copying all ORACLE files (database files, redo logs, binaries etc.) to the
: new host.
:
: However, when trying to open the database with dbstart I get the following
: error message:
:
: SQLDBA> ORACLE instance started.
: ORA-00205: error in identifying control file '/users/oracle/dbs/ctrl1hdb.ctl'
: ORA-09782: sfifi: another instance has the same database mounted.

I have had the same experience, but it was due to a feature that has been documented somewhere in a readme.unix file.

It goes something like this: In v6, Oracle used to identify the shared memory segment for the SGA by the SID alone: in v7 it uses the combination of the $ORACLE_HOME and SID information. For some obscure reason this means that you can have problems if your $ORACLE_HOME (or possibly $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory) exists as a symbolic link.

I did get the thing working eventually with a symbolic link by changing the level of subdirectory where the symbolic link appeared, but it wasn't obvious why it should have worked... I created two of the levels of the original path as real subdirectories, then sym-linked to the third.

-- 
Jonathan Lewis