Thanks Jared,,,yes both are set to auto start - even if I go and manually start the service it takes soem time and says service didnt respond in a timly fashion and the status shows as starting forever.... Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Is the service set to start Automatic? Is the database set to autostart? ( ORA_<SID>_AUTOSTART set to TRUE in the registry) On 11/29/05, Mark John <mark_mit09@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hi All OS - XP Oracle - 8i (one of our clients has 8i and doents want to change) I created a simple db throught hte DB config assistant. and was able to login. But once the machine is restarted when I try to login it says ORACLE not available. wen I checj the service through control panel - the particular srv is keeps on saying startng...tnslsner is started I tried creating a new service thru oradim and starting it - it says errors in processign parameters...went into sql plus and did startup pfile...open recover...it says db mounted etc,,,but the service doenst start at all? Any suggestion would be welcome - Is 8i and xp angry with each other? --------------------------------- Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist --------------------------------- Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free.