Originally posted by stmontgo
if you cannot update the alert log you are fubared. If oracle cannot wrie to the alert log it will terminate itself when it tries to do so

try a log switch as suggested.
No thats not true at all..... Oracle can run even if it cannot write to alert.log file. However, if Windows permissions are not set correctly (or have recently been incorrectly changed) the database can potentially suffer serious problems such as errors writing to files and/or crashing.

Check if SYSTEM has necessary permissions to write to alertlog file. If SYSTEM does not have full permissions to where the alert log resides, there will be no writes made to the alert log file.