well, we are not quite there yet. And I have been chanting the mantra. I am going to spend the day playing with this arena some more.

As a test of something you put in one of your replies, I also dropped the system tablespace. Big mistake. Now I get to practice full recovery. I am going to take my cold backup from the 3rd, restore the dbf files, control files, etc. Then, I am going to dump a trace of the current control file, copy over the archive logs since cold backup, and see what happens.

Now, will this work? If i restore the dbf's in conjunction iwth the control file, the SCN's and other information should jive right. Cause its not really a new instance, its a copy of the old.