Oracle 8.1.6 start-up problem

Hi,

We are using Oracle v8.1.6 in MTS mode.
We install and start Oracle as part of the product installation. At times, our db-start script (which first starts the listener and then starts the Oracle instance), comes out with the following error message :

Connected.
ORA-01081: cannot start already-running ORACLE - shut it down first

When we do ps -ef | grep ora, we see only the listener process running.

The log file for our custom db-start script shows that it first checks to see if the listener is already running. Since it is not running, first the listener process is started. Then it checks to see if the instance is running (the check is based on a ps check) :

  proccnt=$(ps -ef | grep -i ora_.*$1 | grep -v "grep" | wc -l)  

If [ $proccnt -gt 0 ] it concludes that the instance is already running, otherwise it concludes (as in this particular case) that the instance is not
running.

It then tries to start the instance and immediately gives :

Connected.
ORA-01081: cannot start already-running ORACLE - shut it down first

Any ideas on what is going on ? If Oracle is already running why don't we
see the processes in a ps command ?

Thanks,

Gunjeet Received on Wed Jun 21 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT