I installed Oracle 8i (8.1.6) on Windows XP Professional and noticed
that it worked fine after I installed it, but after I rebooted the
OracleOraHome8TNSListener would come up fine but the OracleServicePORTDB
(my oracle instance) service would try to come up, but wouldn't come
up fully. Yeah--that's super vague. In the XP Services applet,
it would show up as Starting as opposed to Started.
There was an ORACLE and an ORADRIM process running, though. So I was
puzzled.
Hunting through google search results is really enlightening from a
sociological viewpoint, but not a technical one. Finally found a
post that mentioned Oracle 8i works fine under Windows XP Professional
but that you have to manually start the services.
So if you switch those services to Manual startup, and then
write yourself a nice batch script like this:
net start oracleorahome8tnslistener
net start oracleserviceportdb
(fill in your instance service name for the second one)--then it works
fine.