Oracle Database Discussions

The company I work for has some servers where some components aren't that new anymore, so to have some backup in case of hardware failure. So we were planning on making some 1:1 clones of the current servers to switch them out in case of an emergency. As most of the necessary data isn't volatile and we'd have to reset some stuff anyway, there was no need for replicaton, swapping out an old version of the database would work just fine. Now we couldn't easily get replacments for our old hardware, so we had to set up some new machines. And this is where my trouble starts, as now I had to actually set up the system and database instead of doing a plain byte-for-byte copy. I'm mainly a programmer, using Oracle from the "other" side, but as our DBA has yet to arrive and the work needs to be done now...

So I did some reasearch and set out to do a normal cold backup. I dumped the controlfile, copied the data and the configuration files to the new server, and read the control file from the SQL prompt (no errors there). After some initial hiccups with the system (memory etc.), I finally was about to start the database, only to get an ORA-01190 error ("control file or data file 1 is from before the last RESETLOGS").

I assume that I either did something wrong when restarting the database (used the wrong part of the control file) or when copying the data. The original data was divide across two logical drives, and for simplicity's sake I copied their whole content. So maybe I copied not to little but too much?

Like I said in the introductory paragraph, I'm no DBA, but I'm willing to learn and listen. I don't expect a full solution, but some guidelines where to look and what to avoid. Any help in this subject would be appreciated.