What am I doing wrong?

[james07]

K, I'm running 8.1.6 Standard on Solaris 7.

I have 3 control files.

I cp them from their orginal location onto 3 differen't disk drive.

I motified the changes in initstupid.ora to effect the new settings.

but when I startup the database, it give me an error:
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00205: error in identifying controlfile, check alert log for more info.

so I set the damn thing back..hehehe

what should I do?

thanks

[sysdba]

What did alert_stupid.log say?

[sln81]

When copying the controlfiles, did you make sure that the database was shutdown?
Check the permissions on the disk directories where you placed the controlfiles now.

[rsuri]

this could be a permission problem as well; Does the Oracle user (that starts the database) has permission to create/update a file on those file systems ?

[james07]

there is nothing in the alter_stupid.log file.

do I have to alter database rename file?

[sambavan]

It would always be advisible to back up the control file before you start playing with that. Check the file permissions, check the initsid path of your control file and always shutdown the database before you start fiddling with the control file. At this point my suggestion would be the following. backdown to the original status and make sure that you are able to bring up the database. then do a clean shutdown. copy the control file to the appropriate locations. make the modifications in the initsid.ora file start up the database by first brining it on the nomount stage, then the mount stage then the recovery (if you have the archive mode on) and then open the database.

I hope this would solve ou the problem. In the mean time could you also post the alert log message.

Sam

[james07]

I got it!!

the stupid file size on the control01 and the rest did not match up.. don't know what I did, to have alter it so fast, but I good now.

oh by the way, since this is a farely new box, I didn't see any alert log. Unless you guys meant the errors that I get from the sql prompt.

But in anycase, I'm good for now.

thanks for all the suggestions.

[sambavan]

No! every instance would have its own alert log file. You can find the alert log file at
$ORACLE_BASE/admin/sid/bdump/alert_sid.log

Check that out.

Sam