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.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?