Recover database without backup

I have a colleague who has been trying to recover several databases that were running on an Oracle 8 server.

The Windows 2000 server Oracle was running on crashed, though luckily the only corrupted files seem to have been from the operating system. He was able to copy all non-corrupted files off the hard drive from the server machine before reinstalling the operating system.

Most of the Oracle databases that were on the machine prior to the crash had no recent backups (dump files), so all he has left to work with are the .DBF, .CTL, etc. files that comprised the databases prior to reinstalling everything. Is it possible to restore a database using only its data files? A while back I had been told by someone that they were able to do this by taking an active instance (or in this case, a new instance) offline, replacing the database's data files and reactivating it -- unfortunately, my colleague has had no luck thus far with this method. Received on Wed Oct 19 2005 - 18:54:35 CDT