Oracle: Getting ORA-01195 and ORA-01110 when attempting resetlogs

Question

I am trying to get our database to startup. When I login to sqlplus and do a startup, I get the message:

Total System Global Area  534462464 bytes
Fixed Size                  2215064 bytes
Variable Size             331350888 bytes
Database Buffers          192937984 bytes
Redo Buffers                7958528 bytes
Database mounted.
ORA-01589: must use RESETLOGS or NORESETLOGS option for database open

So I do a shutdown, startup mount (which works fine) and then run:

SQL> alter database recover using backup controlfile until cancel;
alter database recover using backup controlfile until cancel
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00283: recovery session canceled due to errors
ORA-19909: datafile 1 belongs to an orphan incarnation
ORA-01110: data file 1: '/<path>/system01.dbf'


SQL> alter database open resetlogs;
alter database open resetlogs
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01195: online backup of file 1 needs more recovery to be consistent
ORA-01110: data file 1: '/<path>/system01.dbf'

I know I've used instructions to get me past this error before, but I seem to be having trouble tracking it down.

A bit of history: We wanted to refresh the data in this from another db so we attempted to do a expdb/impdb into this instance. The impdb did not complete correctly and got an end of file error message in it and hung (I still have the message in a log if it's important).

Since the instance would start at this point, we decided to use the hotbackup process we have to restore the db. The hotbackups are from another server/instance. We went through the same process 2 weeks ago. At the point of recreating the control file is where we got to the issue above.

Answer 1

Before restoring from hot backup you should make sure that there are no old control files left from the broken instance. Also you should move out or delete any existing data files that match location and file name with the database being recovered.

Answer 2

You use old controlfile, but files that you try to recover are from newer incranation of database. If you want to use backup controlfile, than you must restore your datafiles from backup. Do not restore redolog files in any case!!