Please can anyone help me.. I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to get my database up.. We are on Oracle 7.3.3 and AIX 4.2.1 platform. The database in question is a logging database of transactions and events.. We thought we had a good backup, but the tape drive was rewinding and rewriting over all the files even though rmt0.1 was used.. To make things short, we lost a few dbf files in the process, and now we have all system files, and most of the database files.. There are approximately 4 database files missing.. named LOG22_logdata18.dbf, LOG22_logdata19.dbf and LOG22_logdata20.dbf. My question is this. How can I bring the database up (if it is even possible) with these files missing? Can I create dummy files and attempt, or is there a way for Oracle to ignore the missing dbf files, and bring up the database without those files, or is there any tool in the market that can read these dbf files and make some sense to us so we can recover some of the missing data? I can do a cat or more on these .dbf files, and see data that makes sense, in addition to special characters..
Any suggestions on what direction I can take is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Ralph