OracleServiceSID not starting

[Cstyle]

Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Release 8.1.6.0.0
Windows 2000 Service Pack 2

I ran into something weird over the weekend. I rebooted the machine
oracle was on. The OracleServiceSID appears to be hung. It just says
'Starting'. It never switches over to 'Started', it never fails.
When I connect through SQL Plus it says 'connected to an idle
instance'. At which point, I can issue 'startup', and the database
comes right up and works fine. All the while OracleServiceSID still
has a status of 'Starting'. I've kicked the machine a few times, and
every time the service appears to hang. I have to manually start up
the database, and the database runs fine, but the service still hangs.
Has anyone seen this before? Have any ideas? Thanks!

[Howard J. Rogers]

I don't know if this applies to you, but it will certainly achieve the same
results.

When you create a service for an Oracle instance, you use a tool called
ORADIM (and if Oracle creates it for you automatically, it basically is
doing the same thing). The syntax of ORADIM goes:

oradim -NEW -SID xxx -INTPWD blah -PFILE c:\somewhere\init.ora -STARTMODE
auto

So: if you change the 'internal password', the service has the wrong
information about how to authenticate. If you change the location of your
init.ora, it can't start the Instance for you, because the location it knows
about isn't the right one. It sits there 'starting' but can never actually
'start'.

I'm sure there are other occasions when it doesn't quite do the job
properly, either, but these are the two classic cases.

The solution? Probably the easiest thing is to use oradim to delete the
original service, and re-create it with all the right parameters, pointing
to the right init.ora and password.

Regards
HJR

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