I cannot explain this feature and is part of why I reached out to this group. As noted previously, the restore works just fine including the table space that won't come online which suggests that the error is software not hardware. I spent a couple of hours on Friday reading the fine manual and it states pretty clearly that one has to be able to do a recover after a noarchivelog level 0 restore even if there are no logs required. To me, this is nonsensical as a clean level 0 backup should be good enough as one respondent noted. I will have to chat up Oracle support to get any further. Packers and Jets! Thank you all for the assist. Edward Long --- On Sat, 1/22/11, Hemant K Chitale <hemantkchitale@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: From: Hemant K Chitale <hemantkchitale@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: Noarchivelog 11.2.0.1 Restart To: rdhm99a@xxxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: Saturday, January 22, 2011, 12:09 PM Can you explain why you get the error"ORA-16433 the database must be opened in r/w mode" ? Apparently, the database is in read-only mode. Hemant On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Ed Long <rdhm99a@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: All I want to do is restore the database and restart. I don't want to apply any logs at all. Even in noarchivelog I should be able to do this. Anyway, recover database; returns the following: 1: RMAN-03002 failure of recover command 2: ORA-00283 recovery session cancelled due to errors. 3: RMAN-11003 failure during parse/execution of SQL statement: alter database recover if needed start until cancel 4: ORA-00283 recovery session canceled due to errors. 5: ORA-16433 the database must be opened in r/w mode. Edward Long -- Hemant K Chitale http://hemantoracledba.blogspot.com