Maybe an important point I didn't mention is the fact. there was a power cut, and I had to enter this database and recreate undo tablespace to get it up (the usual mode no hidden parameters), then I restarted normally but I prefered to do the export and import I had pending to reduce the tablespaces sizes (i moved some lob segments to a read only tablespace) and because I want to test if everything was ok in the database. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l