On Fri, 21 May 2004 16:58:31 +0100, David Sharples <dsharples@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Its not a password file error, it means some other instance has the > database mounted (or thinks it has) it uses the lk$SID file to determine > this Not necessarily. :( We had a situation just recently 8174 on Windows with the same symptoms that Chris describes. In our case what happened was that a rogue executable started creating multiple shadow processes/threads until the process limit was hit. Shutting down the database and restarting gave us exactly the same error - unable to mount exclusive - this was because as soon as Oracle became available again these rogue threads reconnected - naturally the 3rd party app runs with dba privs so even startup restrict didn't work. Our solution was to kill the client executable, restart the database and then and only then restart the client program. Anyway this was detectable from the alert.log which contained ALTER DATABASE MOUNT Thu May 20 09:34:11 2004 ORA-09341: scumnt: unable to mount database OSD-04400: unable to acquire internal semaphore for process O/S-Error: (OS 183) Cannot create a file when that file already exists. OSD-04400 led us to the cause. though the sqlplus session got ORA-01102 bottom line 1102 seems to get thrown on multiple errors at mount stage Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------