Hi gurus,

I'm trying to activate a standby db on NT (Oracle 8.1.6 EE NT 4.0 SP4)
My primary database SID is 'TEST' and my standby database SID is 'STDBTEST'.
The two instances are on the same machine (OK this is not the right way but this is an experiment).
I follow Oracle instructions (on the primary db):
alter database create standby controlfile as 'e:\standbytest\control01.ctl';
alter system archive log current;

I copied all required files from primary db to standby db and
modified initSTDBTEST.ora.
then
startup nomount pfile = "initSTDBTEST.ora";

but when I attempted:
alter database mount standby database;

I received ORA-01102: cannot mount database in EXCLUSIVE mode
(in both init.ora I've remote_login_passwordfile = none).

It's strange but only if I shutdown the primary database
I'm able to mount the standby db
and then 'recover standby database;' works fine.
So I tryed to restart primary db and I received again
ORA-01102: cannot mount database in EXCLUSIVE mode.
It seems the two instance cannot be up at the same time.

What's wrong?

Thanx in advance

Paolo