Monthly Archives: July 2020


Oracle 11.1 on Windows – ORA-02778

I’ve a funny challenge these days:

Recover a Oracle 11.1.0.6 on Windows installation. I’ve all files in an external drive and I’m trying to make the DB to run on my laptop.

  • I’ve copied to my local disk;
  • Added the entries to the registry that found necessary
  • Re-created the Inventory
  • Re-created a init file with correct locations from the spfile

Now I had still had the error:

SQL> startup nomount
ORA-02778: Name given for the log directory is invalid

Nothing on the logs, all directories mentioned on pfile exist and are writable.

I’ve downloaded the Microsoft ProcessMonitor, configured to trace only Oracle company processes and looked what it tried to read.

Finally I found the culprit: %ORACLE_HOME%\RDBMS\log was missing. Just the log subfolder.

This was during the xcopy to the local disk, I excluded all “log” files, as there were some huge ones. Unfortunately it also excluded this folder. Now looks better:

SQL> startup nomount
ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 1720328192 bytes
Fixed Size                  2130160 bytes
Variable Size             989859600 bytes
Database Buffers          721420288 bytes
Redo Buffers                6918144 bytes
SQL>