Re: OS-Crash

"Rolf Czedzak" <520040398192-0001_at_t-online.de> wrote

> after installing an OS-Patch the so called OS is no longer startable.
> Can someone out there tell me about the procedure to save DB?
> I'd gladly accept an RTF-FAQ, if You'd kindly point me to it; I couldn't
> find an appropriate one.
> 'OS' is NT 4, all neccessary DDL-Scripts are available.

Same thing happened to me after an OS upgrade during which they somehow trashed all our raw devices containing Oracle. Of course there was a backup done before the upgrade attempt. Which was also corrupt. We under protest were forced to use dd to backup. We told them that using dd was not a good idea. Oh well..

Anyway, my reminisces about bad times aside.

Lesson 1. Always, always make a backup when you upgrade the o/s or Oracle. Lesson 2. See lesson 1. ;-)

Okay, now you do not have a backup. Let's assume that the Oracle file systems and files are still intact and not stuffed. You now need to get that off the disks and backed up.

A couple of ways that you can do it. You can boot the machine using DOS or Linux and load a NTFS file system driver. This will enable you to mount the NTFS partitions containing the Oracle data files. Once mounted, you need to get them backed up somewhere. If you boot using Linux, you can probably get the network card going and FTP the files across. If you are using DOS, you can try old Novell or Microsoft TCP/IP DOS stacks and get a network going that way. Probably not an option as you do not have the software (I never threw any of my old software away ;-). In which case you can consider running a null model laplink connection to another machine, or hooking a preformatted FAT drive to the machine (in place of the NTFS system disk). Then do a copy of the database to the FAT that way.

You can also simply re-install NT on the system disk. To be safe, disconnect the other disks first. Install NT. Reconnect the disks. You should see those NTFS file system.

Or you can take the Oracle NTFS disks and hook them up to another NT system and backup/recover the database that way.

Finally - you can also try an emergency boot with NT. If you do not have an emergency disk, you can create one by running the NT installer.

--
Billy