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Re-installing Oracle RAC After Failed Installation

Thu, 01/24/2008 - 20:58 — jimbo

I encountered a situation where I needed to re-install an Oracle RAC installation.

The two nodes in my cluster were fresh installs of Win2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition. In this case I needed to reuse the shared disk between the two nodes.

Running the cluster verification utility (runcluvfy.bat), my two machines passed cluster pre-install check:

> runcluvfy.bat stage -pre crsinst -n rac1,rac2 -verbose.

The problem happened during the actual install itself during Storage Configuration stage. The two partitions that I had previously selected as my OCR and Voting disks were not listed.

Checking the installer logs (these are normally found in C:\Program Files\Oracle\Inventory\logs and will be called installActionsYYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ssAMPM.log), I found the following:

nodeList = rac1,rac2
INFO: Query Returned: B:,E:,F:,G:,H:,I:,J:,K:,L:,M:,N:,O:,P:,Q:,R:,S:,T:,U:,V:,W:,X:,Y:,Z:
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_Drives' to 'B:,E:,F:,G:,H:,I:,J:,K:,L:,M:,N:,O:,P:,Q:,R:,S:,T:,U:,V:,W:,X:,Y:,Z:'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Calling Query ClusterPreinstQueries1.2.1  getPartitionInfo
INFO: Query Returned: ocrcfg,1,1,10229,votedsk1,2,1,10229,,3,1,35001,,3,2,5946
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3,2'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3,2,5946'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3,2,5946,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3,2,5946,,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Setting variable 'sl_OHPartitionsAndSpace' to 'NO_VAL,3,1,35001,,,,3,2,5946,,,'. Received the value from a code block.
INFO: Calling Query NtServicesQueries10.2.0.2.0  ntGetAllOracleServices
INFO: Query Returned: OracleRemExecService,OracleClusterPreinstService
INFO: Calling Query ClusterPreinstQueries1.2.1  RemoveClusterPreinstService

The important line the above mess is:

INFO: Query Returned: ocrcfg,1,1,10229,votedsk1,2,1,10229,,3,1,35001,,3,2,5946

Apparently, the Oracle Installer is smart enough to recognize that 2 of my 4 partitions have labels "ocrcfg" and "votedsk1" and is not listing them because as far as it knows, theses partitions are in use by another cluster.

I tried deleting my partitions, re-sizing them, re-formatting with full NTFS and then restarting the Oracle Installer. Once again, the same problem occurred, the disks still had these labels.

It turns out Oracle includes two utilities that are part of the Clusterware install for removal of disk labels and low-level formatting of partitions

  • guioracleobjmanager.exe
  • logpartformat.exe

The catch here is that you need to retrieve the files from CLUSTER_HOME\bin directory. If you do not have Clusterware installed on another machine, you will not be able to get access to these files and may need to call Oracle support to get copies of them.

In my case, I was able to copy these executables and the appropriate DLLs to my install machines.

Run the guioracleobjmanager.exe tool.

As we can see above, this utility lists any labels that Oracle has applied to the shared storage. We can see the same names we saw in the install log: ocrcfg and votedsk1.

From a command prompt, we now need to format this partitions using the logpartformat.exe utility:

> logpartformat /q \\.\ocrcfg
> logpartformat /q \\.\votedsk1

Once both partitions have been formatted, we need to remove the labels from the disks using the Oracle Object Manager.

Check the checkbox on each line with the disk labels that we just formatted and select the Commit menu item from the Options menu.

The partitions should now appear in Oracle Universal Installer during the Clusterware installation.


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