Oracle/AIX unable to start database

Hi all,

Can someone help me out? I have a very strange problem. I'm running Oracle 7.2.3.0.0 on AIX 4.2.1. Recently I've switched on automatic redo log archiving. Now the database refuses to start if I try to start it from the oracle account, but it WILL start if executed from the operator account. The error message is generated when starting ARCH, giving an AIX system code 13: permission denied. Obviously there's a file permission problem somewhere. But it is the oracle userid which owns all the executables, files, directories etc! There are no error messages in the alert_log. If I use the AIX trace facility, I see the following at the point where I believe ARCH is being forked:

139 oracleLIVE     12332           fork:   pid=20018 tid=24891
12E oracleLIVE     20018           close fd=0
107 oracleLIVE     20018                   lookuppn: /dev/null
15B oracleLIVE     20018           open /dev/null fd=0 RDONLY
12E oracleLIVE     20018           close fd=1
12E oracleLIVE     20018           close fd=2
107 oracleLIVE     20018                   lookuppn: /opt/ssid/archive/
                                                    archived_redo_logs/live
135 oracleLIVE     20018           exit wait_status=8D00 lockct=0001

( I've broken the lookuppn line for readability )

Does anyone know what an 8D00 wait_status is?

The permissions on the directory structure where the archived redo log files are to be placed are:

drwxr-xr-x   6 root     system       512 16 Sep 18:36 /opt
drwxr-xr-x  12 ssid     oracle       512 23 Sep 09:49 /opt/ssid
drwxr-sr-x   5 oracle   dba          512 17 Sep 21:23 /opt/ssid/archive
drwxr-sr-x   3 oracle   dba          512 10 Sep 15:47 /opt/ssid/archive/
                                                       archived_redo_logs
drwxrwxrwx   2 oracle   dba         3584 30 Sep 14:52 /opt/ssid/archive/
                                                       archived_redo_logs/live

Thanks, Dave.

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