ORA-01033

Why might you get an ORA-01033? Yesterday I was moving a test database from one file system on one UNIX server to a new file system on a different UNIX server. I closed the database on the old server and un-mounted the file system. Then I recreated the database on the new server and amended the developers’ Windows tnsnames.ora file to point to the new database. Unbeknown to me, a developer had a login to the old server and said there was still a pmon process for the database there. There was but it was created by an automatic job, which I did not know about, which tried to open the database. This job appears to have run at 2300 hours yesterday evening:

 

Solaris > ps -ef|grep TESTDB01|grep -v grep

  oracle 22385     1   0 23:00:05 ?           0:02 ora_mman_TESTDB01

  oracle 22405     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:00 ora_reco_TESTDB01

  oracle 22397     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:03 ora_ckpt_TESTDB01

  oracle 22374     1   0 23:00:05 ?           0:18 ora_pmon_TESTDB01

  oracle 22414     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:02 ora_mmnl_TESTDB01

  oracle 22401     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:01 ora_smon_TESTDB01

  oracle 22410     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:03 ora_mmon_TESTDB01

  oracle 22381     1   0 23:00:05 ?           0:02 ora_psp0_TESTDB01

  oracle 22389     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:02 ora_dbw0_TESTDB01

  oracle 22393     1   0 23:00:06 ?           0:03 ora_lgwr_TESTDB01

Solaris >

 

When I tried to access the database, I got an ORA-01033:

 

Solaris > sqlplus system/manager

 

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.3.0 - Production on Thu Aug 16 16:41:18 2012

 

Copyright (c) 1982, 2006, Oracle.  All Rights Reserved.

 

ERROR:

ORA-01033: ORACLE initialization or shutdown in progress

 

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