ORA-00445: background process "PMON" did not start after 120 seconds

I have a wierd situation on my hands. We originally had relinked oracle (8.1.7) under the root user in linux by accident and when the database was started up, some of the processes were running as root. A problem for obvious reasons. So we shutdown did some relinking with the oracle user, changed some ownerships. Now when we try to start the database, it times out and we get
ORA-00445: background process "PMON" did not start after 120 seconds in one of the alert logs. Looking at a log I see that the startup does read the init<SID>.ora file but we get no further output after the bdump, udump and cdump locations get set.

We also get the ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel error but that is easily solved.

I've all over for answers but have come up with nothing. I don't believe that it is an issue with the SHMMAX values or anything like that because the database instance was previously running ok and nothing has changed.

Any ideas or suggestions on the above problem would be greatly appreciated. Has anyone else mistakenly linked and ran the db under root? Solutions? Received on Wed Nov 06 2002 - 08:19:19 CST