ORA-00445: background process "PMON" did not start after 120 seconds

[Ora9989]

I have a wierd situation on my hands. We originally had relinked
oracle (8.1.7) under the root user in linux by accident and when the
database was started up, some of the processes were running as root.
A problem for obvious reasons. So we shutdown did some relinking with
the oracle user, changed some ownerships. Now when we try to start
the database, it times out and we get
ORA-00445: background process "PMON" did not start after 120 seconds
in one of the alert logs. Looking at a log I see that the startup
does read the init<SID>.ora file but we get no further output after
the bdump, udump and cdump locations get set.

We also get the ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel error
but that is easily solved.

I've all over for answers but have come up with nothing. I don't
believe that it is an issue with the SHMMAX values or anything like
that because the database instance was previously running ok and
nothing has changed.

Any ideas or suggestions on the above problem would be greatly
appreciated. Has anyone else mistakenly linked and ran the db under
root? Solutions?

[Telemachus]

What does trussing with follow on the startup get ?
"Ora9989" <ora...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:88b7db56.02110...@posting.google.com...

[Joel Garry]

ora...@hotmail.com (Ora9989) wrote in message news:<88b7db56.02110...@posting.google.com>...

Are you getting any weird ipcs errors or shared areas left around when
you have the db shutdown (as shown by ipcs|grep ora)? What protection
did you set the oracle executable to? Is PMON not starting or
starting quickly then dying (maybe write a tight loop to grep ps)?
Turn on trace debugging in the init.ora.

jg
--
@home is bogus.
How 'bout that Peregrine, eh?
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[Ora9989]

joel-...@home.com (Joel Garry) wrote in message news:<91884734.0211...@posting.google.com>...

I don't get too much for error output. I do have shared areas left
around when the db tries to start. This causes the ora-03113 error
(which I end up clearing up using ipcrm).
As for permissions, the oracle executable has -rwsr-s--x owned by
oracle.

As for setting trace on, I've done that. I'm getting lots of dumps in
the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/log directory. They all pretty much have the
same output in each dump.