Did you run the clusterverify (cluvfy) sucessfully? Did you create the partitions for ASM disks and set the ownerships correclty. Were you able to read the asm disks from all the nodes.? (simple dd) What is the EXACT error message from asm alert log? ...this is the sort of stuff that I just don't get. Better yet, why people are willing to mess with all that. RAC installs go just fine as long as you have the platform set up correctly, yes, but there are too many moving parts regarding storage with this hobbled bits of raw for CRS, ext3/ocfs2 for Oracle Software and raw chunks for ASM. RAC installs, and better yet continuing operations/maintanence are so much simpler with a unified storage presentation. Pick one the supports all the file needs for Oracle ranging from Oracle Home/APPL_TOP, CRS, Database, and all the unstructured data (e.g., imp/exp/loader/arch logs/scripts,external tabs, UTL_FILE,BFILE,etc) and go with it. For instance, a genuine, stable CFS or NFS. ...It turns out that the most religiously and universally correct is NFS and it works quite nicely. Oracle uses it exclusively at Oracle On Demand. Oracle over NFS is not a fleeting idea either. There are futures that make it even better such as built-in MPIO (not bonding where you get HA or load balancing) and full support for windows. ...we are supposed to be chasing simplicity, aren't we? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l