How to Recreate the Controlfile on 10gR2 RAC with ASM and Dataguard

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Laura Sallwasser

Excellent document; thank you very much.  I've just come out of a 48 hour restore/recover nightmare and found this note.  We too had a missing controlfile (10gR2 ASM RAC) only with a twist:  the backup was made with a 3rd party product; IBM's FlashCopy.  The database was in backup mode when the LUNs were copied, but for whatever reason, the DBA decided not to take a backup of the controlfile after stopping the backup.

The FlashCopy LUNs were mounted and I used a text file to create the controlfile.  I could not use RESETLOGS because FlashCopy (like an O/S online backup) causes the datafiles to be marked as fuzzy.  To get through a resetlogs, fuzzy cannot exist.  So I tried creating a controlfile with NORESETLOGS – and it almost worked.

CREATE CONTROLFILE REUSE DATABASE "HEP0" NORESETLOGS FORCE LOGGING ARCHIVELOG
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed
ORA-01229: data file 10 is inconsistent with logs
ORA-01110: data file 10: '+DATA_ASM/hep0/datafile/quest_data.346.695390421'

I checked the online redo file names (asmcmp) before running the script to create the controlfile; a few of us validated all the file names.  A few of us had been working to get this database up and running, so we perhaps we damaged the files themselves, although this seems remote.

I have fixed the FlashCopy scripts so we get the proper controlfile backup, but I was disappointed that I could not recreate a controlfile and have it read the online redo that was part of the FlashCopy.  If anyone has insights into why this did not work, I would appreciate an update.

Regards,

L Sallwasser