Question for oracle 8i gurus.

[Alfonso Harding]

I installed oracle 8i on my xp machine. I was trying to install another program on my machine but it crashed it and after that happened, I noticed that Oracle was acting funny. I deleted it and re-installed it. I noticed that when I tried to run the migration tool, the instances for the old databases that was previously created the first time I installed 8i are being detected by oracle I installed the second time around. What do I do to get rid of the old instances. I've tried everything. I tried disabling them in service manager and I tried looking for them in the .ORA files. Please help!
Thanks.

[Gordon Jenkinson]

You'll need ot edit your registry and remove all Oracle entries, then re-install Oracle. You can try editing the entries but you'll need to be sure what your doing.
To remove Oracle
1. From your start menu choose Run.. and type regedit
2. In regedit select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and then software then Oracle.
3. With the Oracle entry selected hit delete and confirm.
4. Shutdown regedit.
5. Delete the Oracle directory from your hard drive. I assume you have no database you need to backup or that you have it backed up.

Now you can do a fresh Oracle Install.

This procedure assumes that you have no other Oracle products on the machine or that you can re-install them after you remove them.
One other suggestion is to export your registry before you do any deletes. However, I would be very careful restoring backed up registries as they can cause more harm if you are not sure exactly what you're doing.

There may be a safer way to do this but this way has worked for me many times on NT and 2000.
HTH
Gordon.

[Alfonso Harding]

Thanks for the info... Tried it out.. I look for all entries in the registry related to oracle but no luck. Any other ideas before I goto the last resort of erasing my whole hard drive...I really would hate to do that!!

[Gordon Jenkinson]

You may also want to erase the following keys HKEY_CLASS_ROOT/Oracle* too.