Re: ORA-00376 File cannot be read at this time (system tablespace datafile _at_ shutdown)

I wrote:  

 Hello all;  

 I encountered the following scary situation yesterday after recovering my  production database after a system crash corrupted one of my datafiles.  

 Our digital Unix system crashed yesterday due to advanced file system errors.  When we got it back up, I started our production database and watched it  successfully do crash revovery and come up OK. Based on past experiences with  this (sarcasm mode=on) truely robust (sarcasm mode=off) environment consisting of  Digital unix 3.2d and Oracle 7.4 we proceeded to do a full database export which

           ooops should be -> 7.1.4

 detected a corruption in one table. We've been through this twice before, that's  why we do the full export. Of course the first time this happened we were of the  belief that the operating system and oracle could handle these types of things,  but that led us stright in to a 40+ continous hour recovery in which we did  incomplete (no resetlogs) followed by complete revovery to completely recover our  database (if you're interested in details, email me). Anyway, we restored the  affected datafile from our most recent backup and recovered it up until current  via the "recover datafile" command. The database came up just fine, and we  re-exported the corrupted table to ensure that it was indeed ok, and it was.  

 The scary situation I mentioned above (as if the curruption wasn't scary enough)  was that a few times during this sequence of events we encountered the following  errors when *shutting the database down*:  

         ORA-00604 Error occurred at recursive SQL level 2
         ORA-00376 File 1 cannot be read at this time
         ORA-01110 Data file 1: our *system* tablespace datafile name here!!!
 

 The 00376 message states that the most likely cause of this is that the file is  offline. This is our SYSTEM tablespace datafile, the database was just up and  open, and this happened when we shut it down. We started it right back up and  looked at v$datafile etc etc and everything looked OK with that datafile, not to  mention that the database was up and open! Eventually we did a shutdown immediate  followed by a startup followed by shutdown normal and the errors disappeared.  

 I'm going to call this in to Oracle tomorrow, but was wondering if anyone here  had seen anything like this?  

 TIA    --  

 David J. DeWolfe
 Systems Programmer III
 Statewide Office of Information Services  University of Alaska
 907.474.7399
 sxdjd_at_orca.alaska.edu  

> In a vicious struggle for survival intelligence emerges as the weapon of
> choice. - Nova, In Search of Human Origins
Received on Sun Sep 22 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST