I guess all of you as DBA have used the dbshut and dbstart command. I am in Oracle 8.1.6 (with the fix on the dbstart script).
As part of the system backup script, dbstart is called after a cold backup. The incident was, when the cold backup script called 'dbstart', for some reason the database was already up.

I went thro the dbstart script and if the db is already up, it does a shutdown abort and bring the db up again. The script thinks 'Database X possibly left running when system went down (system crash?)".

Has anyone made changes to not to 'abort and start' if the db is already up ?

I am seriously thinking of doing this in a different manner. Instead of changing dbstart itself, in this master script (which at one point calls dbstart), make a check to see if the db is already up or not ? If up, do not proceed with the dbstart ? I know the db is not supposed to be up for a cold backup, hence making the cold backup useless.

Any comments and/or suggestions ?