Tue, 04 Apr 2006
ORA 01081 "cannot start already-running ORACLE - shut it down first"
I was creating an Oracle database and got the error message:
ORA 01081 "cannot start already-running ORACLE - shut it down first"
however, I had already stopped everything, and ps showed there were no oracle processes running. It turns out that there were some IPC semaphores and shared memory identifiers which had to be killed before the database could be created.
In my case,
ipcs -a | grep dba
showed the resources that needed to be killed, and ipcrm with the appropriate options kills them. The ID of the resource to kill is in the second column.
ipcs -a | grep dba | perl -ane 'system "ipcrm -$F[0] $F[1]"'