Oracle Database Discussions

Hi,

I have a 11.2.0.2.0 installation which suffered a power failure and I'm trying to restart.

The startup fails with:

SQL> startup
ORA-32004: obsolete or deprecated parameter(s) specified for RDBMS instance
ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 1.9241E+10 bytes
Fixed Size                  2234616 bytes
Variable Size            1.4361E+10 bytes
Database Buffers         4831838208 bytes
Redo Buffers               45686784 bytes
Database mounted.
ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel

Which lead me to the alert log:

ORA-19815: WARNING: db_recovery_file_dest_size of 214748364800 bytes is 100.00% used, and has 0 remaining bytes available.

I would like to fix this by increasing the size of the recovery area. Is there a way to determine how much space would be required? Or should I just go for 300G? 400G? The disk itself has 500G free.

The problem is that I'm unable to start the database to run the 'alter system set db_recovery_file_dest_size=...' command.

But I should be able to at least temporarily alter this in the init.ora file, right?

I've changed my init.ora to contain the line:

db_recovery_file_dest_size=400G

But when I try to startup, I get the same error, and the log showing the initialization params shows:

Starting up:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options.
Using parameter settings in server-side spfile /oracle/11gr2/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_2/dbs/spfilemimic2.ora
System parameters with non-default values:
...[snip]
  db_recovery_file_dest_size= 200G

So perhaps it's not reading my init.ora file? Or overriding it with the spfile?

Can someone help me alter the recovery_file size?

Thanks,

Dan