Oracle Shutdown error ORA-01033

Question

I had installed Oracle 11g on windows 07,everything was working fine.But today it is giving me an error saaying ORA-01033: ORACLE initialization or shutdown in progr

Answer 1

There's more info needed to be able to solve similar issues. Questions like these are interesting to get answered:

• To what level can you start the database ? None, nomount, mount or open (exclude the last one in this case)
• What does the ALERT.LOG file show ? This from the moment the first issue is suspected to be around
• An obvious question is just : what happened ? What action were you doing when you saw the first error message ?
• Can you shutdown the database ? If yes, which methods : normal, immediate or abort only ? Know that stopping the database with ABORT option may make problems bigger as they are already.
• Did you try rebooting the server ? This is particularly an issue on Windows, which is your case.
• Depending on how you stopped the database, do you have a cold backup ?
• Depending on RMAN still working : can you take a backup ? The RECOVERY you were trying is not bad, but it could be interesting to know what is happening on OS level with that file; Is it there ? If yes, is it locked or not ? Does the OS think it's a valid file ?

Answer 2

First, check your ALERT.LOG file typically located in D:\app\oracle\diag\rdbms\DBNAME\SID\trace\.

The latest entries in your ALERT.LOG should give you an indication on what is going on. Is the database starting? Shutting down?

Should the database be stuck in the shutdown process, you can try to kill the oracle.exe process and then restart the database via Windows Service.

Often, when the database seems to hang on startup, it is actually applying REDO to get a consistent state, so pay close attention on what the ALERT.LOG tells you.