This may or may not be directly related to Oracle but hey, that's where diversity comes into picture...

I have an Oracle 8i (8.1.5) DSS system running on NT 4.0 (SP 6) on an HP LXR-8500 server.

The database size is 37GB

When I shutdown the database for cold backup and try to backup the files, somewhere down the road we get an error message --

"Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service"

The error shows up after copying about 20GB of datafiles.

This server has 4GB of RAM, 6GB of Pagefile and plenty of free space. The CPU usage is < 40%

Some of the datafiles are 5GB size (I don't think that old 2GB limit should matter for this system)

Obviously it does not seem to be an Oracle problem but then --
if I leave the database open and copy the open files, it copies everything !!!

So the problem arises only when I shutdown the database (thus closing the files)

There is nothing wrong with any datafile; I can copy each file individually without any problem. For the time being I have broken my backup into 2 jobs and I Boot the server in between in order to finish the second phase of backup.

This seems more like a Paged Memory Pool issue with NT or HP but I am posting it here in case somebody has gone thru this already.

Thanks,
- Rajeev