Oracle 9i Recovery (Loss of Server Parameter File)

Loss of Server Parameter File (spfile)

If your server parameter file (spfile) becomes corrupt, and you haven't been creating a textual init.ora parameter file as a backup, you can pull the parameters from it using the strings command in UNIX to create an init.ora file. You will need to edit the resulting file to get rid of any garbage characters in it (but don't worry about the "*." characters at the beginning of the lines) and make any corrections to it before using it to start your database, but, at least you will have something to go by:

C:\> Copy the InitPROD.ora from the backup to $ORACLE_HOME\dbs

If you have been saving off a textual init.ora parameter file as a backup, you can restore that init.ora file to the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory in UNIX (or $ORACLE_HOME\database directory in NT).
You will need to delete the corrupt spfile before trying to restart your database, since Oracle looks for the spfile first, and the init.ora file last, to use as the parameter file when it starts up the database (or, you could leave the spfile there and use the pfile option in the startup command to point to the init.ora file). Then, once your database is up, you can recreate the spfile using the following (as sysdba):

sqlplus “/ as sysdba”
sql> create spfile from pfile;