Oracle Tips

Recover Corrupt/Missing Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) with No Backup - (Oracle 10g) It happens. Not very often, but it can happen. You are faced with a corrupt or missing Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) and have no backup to recover from. So, how can something like this occur? We know that the CRSD process is responsible for creating backup copies of the OCR every 4 hours from the master node in the CRS_home/cdata directory. These backups are meant to be used to recoverthe OCR from a lost or corrupt OCR file using the ocrconfig -restore command, so how is it possible to be in a situation where the OCR needs to be recovered and you have no viable backup?
Well, consider a scenario where you add a node to the cluster and before the next backup (before 4 hours) you find the OCR has been corrupted. You may have forgotten to create a logical export of the OCR before adding the new node or worse yet, the logical export you took is also corrupt. In either case, you are left with a corrupt OCR and no recent backup. Talk about a bad day! Another possible scenario could be a shell script that wrongly deletes all available backups. Talk about an even worse day.
In the event the OCR is corrupt on one node and all options to recover it have failed, one safe way to re-create the OCR (and consequently the voting disk) is to reinstall the Oracle Clusterware software. In order to accomplish this, a complete outage is required for the entire cluster throughout the duration of the re-install. The Oracle Clusterware software will need to be fully removed, the OCR and voting disks reformatted, all virtual IP addresses (VIPs) de-installed, and a complete reinstall of the Oracle Clusterware software will need to be performed. It should also be noted that any patches that were applied to the original clusterware install will need to be re-applied. As you can see, having a backup of the OCR and voting disk can dramatically simplify the recovery of your system!
A second and much more efficient method used to re-create the OCR (and consequently the voting disk as well) is to re-run the root.sh script from the primary node in the cluster. This is described in Doc ID: 399482.1 on the My Oracle Support web site. The procedures actually call for running the rootdelete.sh and rootdeinstall.sh on all nodes in the cluster before running root.sh. In my opinion, this method is quicker and much less intrusive than reinstalling Oracle Clusterware and the one described in the following article:
Recover Corrupt/Missing Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR) with No Backup - (Oracle 10g)