ORA-27100: shared memory realm already exists

[oraclechick]

Hi,
I am trying to create a database via a korn shell script. When i do a startup nomount of that database (via the script), I get the following errors..

ORA-27100: shared memory realm already exists
SVR4 Error: 17: File exists

I dont know why i am getting these errors - when i do the following below, the output shows, no shared memory. And the SVR4 error - what file is it referring to? How do I fix this problem?

oracle@server /u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/bin> sysresv

IPC Resources for ORACLE_SID "db1" :
Shared Memory
ID              KEY
No shared memory segments used
Semaphores:
ID              KEY
No semaphore resources used
Oracle Instance not alive for sid "db1"

[davey23uk]

is the a lk file in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs for that SID - if there is remove it (ONLY if the database is down)

also double check your environment settings before running the script and check to see if any are being set in the script

[oraclechick]

no, there is no lk file for that sid. there is however a hc_db1.dat file - should i delete this?

my script worked earlier for another sid, so i know that the ORACLE_SID being set in the script works fine.
I dont understand why it worked fine for that sid but not for this.

[davey23uk]

well you said the same thing about your other scripts so it is probably worth checking what happens in your scripts.

hc_.dat is a health check file, dont worry about it

[oraclechick]

I just tried my script again with a different sid (testdb) and that worked fine.
But when I try it with a sid such as "s0839482", I get the errors.
Does it have something to do with the name? Can a sid name consist of numbers?

[davey23uk]

yes a sid can consist of numbers