I will add.... I've seen times that Windows will lock files and it dosen't matter what you do (including killing the service) the only way to get that lock released is to reboot the box. THAT is a pain. RF Robert G. Freeman Oracle Consultant/DBA/Author Principal Engineer/Team Manager The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Father of Five, Husband of One, Author of various geeky computer titles from Osborne/McGraw Hill (Oracle Press) Sig V1.1 -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Jared Still Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 3:11 PM To: wbfergus@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Restore problem On 5/4/07, Bill Ferguson <wbfergus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hi all, channel ORA_DISK_1: restored backup piece 14 piece handle=E:\BACKUP\BACKED UP DATA\AJIGLMEM_14_1.BAK tag=TAG20070501T220157 channel ORA_DISK_1: reading from backup piece E:\BACKUP\BACKED UP DATA\AJIGLMEM_15_1.BAK ORA-19870: error reading backup piece E:\BACKUP\BACKED UP DATA\AJIGLMEM_15_1.BAK ORA-19504: failed to create file "E:\ORACLE\DATAFILES\NGDB_DATA_06.DBF" ORA-27086: unable to lock file - already in use OSD-00002: additional error information O/S-Error: (OS 32) The process cannot access the file because it is being used b y another process. failover to previous backup Hi Bill, Taking a tablespace offline on windows does not seem to remove the lock that Oracle has on it. When a file is open, the process has a lock (don't know the windows technical term for the type of lock) Just tested this on my laptop: took 10g tablespace EXAMPLE offline, and the handle utility (from Sys Internals toolkit) shows that the EXAMPLE files are still open by Oracle: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- oracle.exe pid: 2848 NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM c: File C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 d8: Section \BaseNamedObjects\*oraspawn_buffer_ts50* f4: Section \BaseNamedObjects\ShimSharedMemory ... 624: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\USERS01.DBF 628: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\EXAMPLE01.DBF 62c: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\EXAMPLE01.DBF ... 664: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\SYSTEM01.DBF 668: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\SYSTEM01.DBF 66c: File C:\oracle\product\10.1.0\oradata\ts50\UNDOTBS01.DBF ... I've never restored a tablespace on Windows, but it appears that your procedure may need to be modified a bit. Have you tried restoring the tablespace with Oracle in mount mode? Our resident RMAN expert (Robert Freeman) may know the answer to this. -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist