Tom's got a backlog reaching well into last year..
Lots of people visit this site everyday in the hope they will be able to ask a question.
And when someone finally gets through..
You get the above question.
In my (not so) humble opinion, a waste of resources.
(ok ok i know, this is not a relevant post, but it bugged me.)

This reminds me of a developer in our organization (very long time back) who has deleted c:\windows folder because he was running out of space. When that developer asked for more space in his system, the system manager advised to remove any folders that he doesnt need, and there went the windows folder in recyclebin...

Sorry for the pun...

Let this be a warning for all of us ;-)!

But seriously...someone capable of installing and maintaining an Oracle server MUST know/have learned before that what 'formatting' or 'OS' means?
Why would one format a C drive after installing a database?
Or...have I been living under a rock too long?
(Just my 2 cents of course.)

Compliments to Tom for answering anyway.

"and then follow the procedures you would follow for performing a full database restore on that machine and restore your existing database."

Better: DESCRIBE them here first.


Regards

Reminds me of the head of IT at a certain company (and good friend of mine) who decided to "rm system.dbf" on their production server to save space. Don't even ask about the backups! Oh, how we laughed...

A good 5 years later we don't let him forget it - but he's never done it again :-)

I worked with software used by mechanical engineers and at one site we were always getting calls about the PC's dying and having to have DOS reinstalled. We had people look at the computers for faults but none were ever found and the problem seemed infuriatingly intermittent and random. Some months later we were on site for training and we covered basic OS commands so they could see their files copy them, back them up to floppy etc. The directory structure they used was pretty simple usually with single directories directly on the root drive. We were in one of these directories showing them the output of the DIR command when my colleague mentioned the . and .. entries at the top of each directory list and told them that they should just ignore these.

One engineer said, "It's funny you can't delete them though, I've tried a couple of times and they just stay there." a couple of the other engineers confirmed this strange behavior because they had tried it for themselves.

BTDT; the day before a management demo, I thought I'd clean up the Oracle V5 linking stuff; could not remove a directory (insufficient privs), decided to do:
su -
rm -rf *
...pulled the power plug just too late - not booting anymore...

Anyway; Prasanth is in luck, as his entire structure resides on the E-drive; after reinstalling Oracle (and patching to the exact level as before!), he should be able to use oradim to recreate the services, using the correct pointer to (hopefully) e:\something\init.ora.
Then, start the services, and presto - his instance should be alive and kicking.
One thing that might be bugging, is the password file - but that can be recreated as well.

This thread is starting to remind me of SharkBait

http://sharkbait.computerworld.com/

Hi tom.,
I have done what you said exactly and i got the previous tablespaces and everything. Thanks a Lot..

Tom,

Given that this is Windows, wouldn't you have to run a new Oradim command in order to define the service and define the database to the registry and the O/S, after reinstalling Windows?