Issue using SVRMGRL in Oracle 8i

Good Afternoon,

I'm a not yet comfortable with administering Oracle 8i, so please forgive the simplicity of my posting. We are currently running Oracle 8i Release 8.1.7.0.0 on Windows NT 4.0 (service pack 5), and I'm attempting to configure the ARCServe "Oracle Agent" in order to perform complete, system wide recovery. As some of you may realize, ARCHIVELOG mode must be enabled in order for this backup mechanism to run correctly. As a result, I opened a SVRMGR command window, and verified that ARCHIVELOG mode was *not* enabled by entering the command "Archive log list". According to the instructions provided by Computer Associates (vendor of ARCServe 2000), a series of commands must be entered in order to enable ARCHIVELOG mode. The ARCServe documentation recommended the following:

(a) At the svrmgr prompt, type the following : "shutdown abort" (in order to shutdown the Oracle instance)
(b) The user must now reconnect to Oracle using the internal account; once reconnected, type the following series of commands:

"startup mount database"
"alter database archivelog"
"alter database open"
" archive log start"

Nevertheless, after having issued the "shutdown abort" command, I'm unable to startup the database. For example, when I type "startup mount <name of database>", I'm presented with an error message that states - ORA-00205 error in identifying control file name. I checked some online resources, but could not find any helpful suggestions as to why this error was being generated. Any insight on this matter would be greatly appreciated, at present, I'm unable to start the database. Received on Tue Jul 17 2001 - 03:09:43 CEST