Davey,

First, thanks for replying. I am by no means a certified database administrator, and I can honestly I got the job because I held the right security clearance. Other than that, this is all me learning on the job, I have never had an Oracle class.

That said, I tried recovery using the Enterprise Manager.

In the Enterprise manager on the Oracle server, there was an option for "recovery." I tried that two separate ways: first, to recover the whole database; secondly, I tried to go by a single database item (five separate files came up with check-boxes... and I chose the one related to the file (system01.dbf) that appeared in the error.

I also tried identifying the file that needed recovery by using the SQL code:

SQL> select name, status from v$datafile where status not in ('ONLINE', 'SYSTEM');

I used that before and got a list with the file that needed recovery, but this time the response was something like "no files".

Thank you again for responding so quickly.