Hi Mark, I think the simplest way to understand where the problem lies is to open a cmd window and issue sqplus "/ as sysdba" then inside sqlplus try shutdown immediate; startup; and see the error message, usually it helps to understand what is going wrong. Hope it helps, Giovanni On 11/28/05, Mark John <mark_mit09@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi > I know this should be fairly simple but I dont seem to get this working. > We have all the OS files (control,data, allologs and ini files). but we > had to reinstall the OS on the machine. Nothing crashed so the data in the > OS files is in tact. So how do I recreate the database from the OS files. > I tried using ORADIM created a instance and then started but when I login > it says initialisation or shutdown in progress..what am I doing wrong? > > ------------------------------ > Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it > free.<http://pa.yahoo.com/*http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=36035/*http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/> > > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Another free oracle resource profiler http://sourceforge.net/projects/oraresprof/ Now version 0.9