Kind of urgent database not autostarting after upgrade

All
 I apologise I haven't had time to thank those who responded to my question about passing a list of variables to a stored procedure.

There have been many fires burning here... so I haven't had time to respond.

The problem I'm experiencing is this

Management decided to upgrade the OS on our one of our development servers. No one asked for any input from me... but guess who they are asking to fix it??
I assure you all I had absolutely nothing to do with upgrading the OS without checking compatibility issues.
<sigh...>

We have 30 instances
5 - 7.34
5 - 8.05
20 - 8.1.6
Running on NT 4.0 sp6a 4G ram, twin 500 processors. All these databases are *not* production but rather development databases. The physical server's resources seemed to be more than adequate and never were an issue

The problem began when the OS was upgraded to WIN2K server, now all the 8.16 dbs will not start automatically (upon boot) If I look at the service it says "starting" rather than started. Trying to connect with sql plus as internal I get "connected to an idle instance" So the only way to start the db is to pass sql plus the startup pfile=.... Then I'm good to go.

I have a tar with Oracle and did the following recommendations 1. Applied the highest patch to 8.16 + a special 1 off patch, made no difference
At that point Oracle suggested to upgrade to 8.17 as 8.16 is not supported on WIN2K server
2. Installed Oracle 8.17, set the home to 8.17 migrated 1 db as a test; all other dbs were started via batch script

The new (migrated db still exhibits the original symptoms after the upgrade) which were
If you try to connect via sql+ I get Oracle not available The db is listed as "starting" rather than started" I must physically start the db using SQL> startup pfile=... Or

e.g.
[startup.bat]

svrmgrl.exe command='@C:\db_startup\initdb8i.sql' C:\sleep 3
svrmgrl.exe command='@C:\db_startup\initdbdev.sql' ...

[initdb8i.sql]

connect internal/password_at_db8i
startup pfile=T:\Admin\db8i\PFILE\initdb8i.ora exit

Oracle is saying this is bug 1266248 which precisely describes the problem

Does anyone have any info or a solution for this??

As always many thanks....

Bob

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Author: Bob Metelsky
  INET: bmetelsky_at_cps92.com

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