Hello,
this may sound very silly, but I need to ask anyway, because I spent 1/2
day already trying to figure it out, mabey I'm missing something basic.
I have an Oralce 8.1.7 database on AIX. It was backed up regurlary, but
in my silliness, I never backed up the init.ora file for it.
Well, the drive it was on crapped out, and upon replacment, my database
(of course) wound't start, no init file. Is there an easy way to rebuild
this file? I tried a generic OOB init file, but it doesn't work (didn't
think it would).
It's not a super important database, we mostly use DB2 now, this was
just left over from years ago and get's used only occasionally now, it's
not big at all.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
Ken

yoyo schrieb:
> Hello,
> this may sound very silly, but I need to ask anyway, because I spent 1/2
> day already trying to figure it out, mabey I'm missing something basic.
> I have an Oralce 8.1.7 database on AIX. It was backed up regurlary, but
> in my silliness, I never backed up the init.ora file for it.
> Well, the drive it was on crapped out, and upon replacment, my database
> (of course) wound't start, no init file. Is there an easy way to rebuild
> this file? I tried a generic OOB init file, but it doesn't work (didn't
> think it would).
> It's not a super important database, we mostly use DB2 now, this was
> just left over from years ago and get's used only occasionally now, it's
> not big at all.
> Any help is appreciated.
> Thanks
> Ken

Things, you should know about your database are:
sid, database name, location of controlfiles and block size (there is
only 5 possibilites, you can try all of them if you don't know it)
Also ( is not a requirement , but is more comfortable )
background_dump_dest can be set to avoid default destination
You can try to start your instance with only that parameters and do
tail -f alert_<SID>.log
So, you will just see, if oracle complains about some parameter and
correct them if needed.

Best regards

Maxim

"Maxim Demenko" <mdemenko@arcor.de> wrote in message
news:42ee33a6$0$6976$9b4e6d93@newsread2.arcor-online.net...
> yoyo schrieb:
>> Hello,
>> this may sound very silly, but I need to ask anyway, because I spent 1/2
>> day already trying to figure it out, mabey I'm missing something basic.
>> I have an Oralce 8.1.7 database on AIX. It was backed up regurlary, but
>> in my silliness, I never backed up the init.ora file for it.
>> Well, the drive it was on crapped out, and upon replacment, my database
>> (of course) wound't start, no init file. Is there an easy way to rebuild
>> this file? I tried a generic OOB init file, but it doesn't work (didn't
>> think it would).
>> It's not a super important database, we mostly use DB2 now, this was just
>> left over from years ago and get's used only occasionally now, it's not
>> big at all.
>> Any help is appreciated.
>> Thanks
>> Ken
>
> Things, you should know about your database are:
> sid, database name, location of controlfiles and block size (there is only
> 5 possibilites, you can try all of them if you don't know it)
> Also ( is not a requirement , but is more comfortable )
> background_dump_dest can be set to avoid default destination
> You can try to start your instance with only that parameters and do
> tail -f alert_<SID>.log
> So, you will just see, if oracle complains about some parameter and
> correct them if needed.
>
> Best regards
>
> Maxim

If you have a backup of the old alert.log file, the modified init.ora
parameters are in it.

HTH
Matthias Hoys

"Maxim Demenko" <mdemenko@arcor.de> wrote in message
news:42ee33a6$0$6976$9b4e6d93@newsread2.arcor-online.net...
> yoyo schrieb:
> > Hello,
> > this may sound very silly, but I need to ask anyway, because I spent 1/2
> > day already trying to figure it out, mabey I'm missing something basic.
> > I have an Oralce 8.1.7 database on AIX. It was backed up regurlary, but
> > in my silliness, I never backed up the init.ora file for it.
> > Well, the drive it was on crapped out, and upon replacment, my database
> > (of course) wound't start, no init file. Is there an easy way to rebuild
> > this file? I tried a generic OOB init file, but it doesn't work (didn't
> > think it would).
> > It's not a super important database, we mostly use DB2 now, this was
> > just left over from years ago and get's used only occasionally now, it's
> > not big at all.
> > Any help is appreciated.
> > Thanks
> > Ken
>
> Things, you should know about your database are:
> sid, database name, location of controlfiles and block size (there is
> only 5 possibilites, you can try all of them if you don't know it)
> Also ( is not a requirement , but is more comfortable )
> background_dump_dest can be set to avoid default destination
> You can try to start your instance with only that parameters and do
> tail -f alert_<SID>.log
> So, you will just see, if oracle complains about some parameter and
> correct them if needed.
>
> Best regards
>
> Maxim

Search your alert log for startup entries.
You'll find all your non-default init.ora parameters there.

Look for something that kinda resembles this:
Starting up ORACLE RDBMS Version: 8.1.5.0.0.
System parameters with non-default values:
processes = 50
shared_pool_size = 52428800
java_pool_size = 20971520
....

I hope you didn't loose your alert log as well. :-D

--

Andreas Sheriff
Oracle 9i Certified Professional
Oracle 10g Certified Professional
Oracle 9i Certified PL/SQL Developer
----
"If you don't eat your meat, you cannot have any pudding.
"How can you have any pudding, if you don't eat your meat?"

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Andreas Sheriff wrote:
> "Maxim Demenko" <mdemenko@arcor.de> wrote in message
> news:42ee33a6$0$6976$9b4e6d93@newsread2.arcor-online.net...
>
>>yoyo schrieb:
>>
>>>Hello,
>>>this may sound very silly, but I need to ask anyway, because I spent 1/2
>>>day already trying to figure it out, mabey I'm missing something basic.
>>>I have an Oralce 8.1.7 database on AIX. It was backed up regurlary, but
>>>in my silliness, I never backed up the init.ora file for it.
>>>Well, the drive it was on crapped out, and upon replacment, my database
>>>(of course) wound't start, no init file. Is there an easy way to rebuild
>>>this file? I tried a generic OOB init file, but it doesn't work (didn't
>>>think it would).
>>>It's not a super important database, we mostly use DB2 now, this was
>>>just left over from years ago and get's used only occasionally now, it's
>>>not big at all.
>>>Any help is appreciated.
>>>Thanks
>>>Ken
>>
>>Things, you should know about your database are:
>>sid, database name, location of controlfiles and block size (there is
>>only 5 possibilites, you can try all of them if you don't know it)
>>Also ( is not a requirement , but is more comfortable )
>>background_dump_dest can be set to avoid default destination
>>You can try to start your instance with only that parameters and do
>>tail -f alert_<SID>.log
>>So, you will just see, if oracle complains about some parameter and
>>correct them if needed.
>>
>>Best regards
>>
>>Maxim
>
>
> Search your alert log for startup entries.
> You'll find all your non-default init.ora parameters there.
>
> Look for something that kinda resembles this:
> Starting up ORACLE RDBMS Version: 8.1.5.0.0.
> System parameters with non-default values:
> processes = 50
> shared_pool_size = 52428800
> java_pool_size = 20971520
> ...
>
> I hope you didn't loose your alert log as well. :-D
>
My Oracle skills started to come back, thanks to all your suggestions.
I found the control files and put those in the init, then based off the
parms in an old alert file, I set those (block size most importantly),
the only thing I struggled with then were rollback segments, but I just
created a new tablespace and new segments, and after it was running ok,
re-created the originals, then blew away my temporary new one.
I don't really know why, but after I had the right segment names, the
database would come up, but they would all be offline, when I
tried to make them online, I got this:

--------------------------------------------------------------
SVRMGR> select segment_name, status from dba_rollback_segs;
SEGMENT_NAME STATUS
------------------------------ ----------------
SYSTEM ONLINE
RBS1 OFFLINE
RBS0 OFFLINE
RBS2 OFFLINE
RBS3 OFFLINE
RBS4 OFFLINE
RBS5 OFFLINE
RBS6 OFFLINE
8 rows selected.
SVRMGR> alter rollback segment rbs0 online;
alter rollback segment rbs0 online
*
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel
--------------------------------------------------------------
The tablespace datafile was there and online.
But anyhow, as I mentioned, a new tablespace with new segments, blew
away the original segments and tablespace. THen it ran fine, so I
re-created the original tbs name and segments (I guess I really didn't
have to), then blew away the temporary new ones I made, restarted and
everything comes up great now.

Thanks to everyone for their help!

Ken