long story short ... I have broken my 11g XE instance and have not managed to get it going again.
what I'm really looking for is either:
* some command to "give up on getting a consistent state - just get the database up so I can work on it" (I reckon I should be able to get things going well enough from there).
or
* some way of re-intialising/rebuilding my XE instance without the installation media (I'm not too bothered about losing my data - I can import that from another db later).
I am unable to download the installation media here as it would take forever on my connection.
I am running on Linux Mint and obviously don't know what I'm doing!
any hints appreciated-
thanks,
Oli.