Oracle 8 CRASH....reason unknown..HELP ! URGENT!

[viztek]

Dear all,

I had Oracle 8.0.5 serever installed.
I was running a client-server application.
Everything was fine suddenly i got database error.
I found that Oracle could not be started

It gave the following messages for not able to start the service.
ORA-01200: actual file size of num is smaller than correct size of num blocks
Also i realized that my datafile which was 3.45 GB size had all of a sudden become 150 MB size.
Somehow the datafile got truncated.
I did not do anything with the database(no installation etc)
I wonder what went wrong.

I am desperate to find why this happened.
My disc space was enough...so there was no space proble.

For your info....
I kept the datafiles ( main ,rollbak,index) separately together which pracle was intalled separately.But on the same drive though..i mean i have logical partisions only.

If anybody could advise on the matter it would be gr8.

Thanks for your patience.

 

[raygg]

Which datafile was it? What tablespaces are affected? Is your database still running ok? If you have archiving turned on you can restore to a previous point in time - see the db backup & recovery part of the oracle administrator's manual. The Error Messages manual says this datafile truncation could be the result of a half completed copy. The action recommended by the manual is to restore a good copy of the datafile and do recovery as needed.

After you do all that you might consider upgrading to 8.0.6 where a lot of the bugs in 8.0.5 are fixed or even better - upgrade to 8.1.7. 8.0.5 is now desupported by oracle and 8.0.6 will be desupported in September.