Manual Oracle Uninstall
A number of people have contacted me regarding problems uninstalling Oracle products. The two methods listed below should only be used as a last resort and will remove all Oracle software allowing a reinstall. If you make any mistakes they can be quite destructive so be careful.
- Windows
- UNIX
Windows
In the past I've had many problems uninstalling all Oracle products from Windows systems. Here's my last resort method:
- Uninstall all Oracle components using the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI).
- Run
and delete theregedit.exe
key. This contains registry entires for all Oracle products.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/ORACLE
- Delete any references to Oracle services left behind in the following part of the registry:
It should be pretty obvious which ones relate to Oracle.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Ora*
- Reboot your machine.
- Delete the "
" directory, or whatever directory is your ORACLE_BASE.C:/Oracle
- Delete the "
" directory.C:/Program Files/Oracle
- Empty the contents of your "
" directory.c:/temp
- Empty your recycle bin.
At this point your machine will be as clean of Oracle components as it can be without a complete OS reinstall.
Remember, manually editing your registry can be very destructive and force an OS reinstall so only do it as a last resort.
UNIX
Uninstalling all products from UNIX is a lot more consistent. If you do need to resort to a manual uninstall you should do something like:
- Uninstall all Oracle components using the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI).
- Stop any outstanding processes using the appropriate utilities:
# oemctl stop oms user/password # agentctl stop # lsnrctl stop
command as the root user.kill -9 pid
- Delete the files and directories below the $ORACLE_HOME:
# cd $ORACLE_HOME # rm -Rf *
- With the exception of the product directory, delete directories below the $ORACLE_BASE.
# cd $ORACLE_BASE # rm -Rf admin doc jre o*
- Delete the /etc/oratab file. If using 9iAS delete the /etc/emtab file also.
# rm /etc/oratab /etc/emtab
Hope this helps. Regards Tim...