Recovering from a CD or tarball

Hi all,

I'm very new to databases in general, and Oracle in particular, so some of my qurestions may seem a bit naive. Please bear with me!

I have been given a CD of files that comprise a cold copy of an existing Oracle database. That is, the CD contains the control files, the *.dbf file and the redo logs of an existing Oracle database (assumedly, the files were just copied onto the CD through conventional OS methods). It seems to be a complete copy of the original data directories. I also have a copy of the initXXX.ora initialization file that was used for the database.

My question is: is that enough to "recover" from? That is to say, can I simply start the svrmgrl program, issue a "connect internal", then issue a "startup" command (with a pfile pointing to the initXXX.oa that came with the database) and expect everything to be a-okay, assuming that the initXXX.ora points to the original control files? Or am I being naive here?

Now let's say that the original databse was an Oracle 7.x database (I think it was 7.3.2.1.0) and the database that I have at my disposal now is an Oracle 8.x (I think 8.1.6) database. Assuming I do everything like I did above, should everything still work?

Thanks in advance!

-- 
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Desmond Rivet                                    des_riv_at_sympatico.ca
Programmer Wannabe

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