Running Oracle 8i on WindowsXP
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 wasn't helpful. 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:
(fill in your instance service name for the second one)--then it works fine.