oracleskill

     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 regedit.exe and delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/ORACLE key. This contains registry entires for all Oracle products.
    * Delete any references to Oracle services left behind in the following part of the registry:
      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Ora*
      It should be pretty obvious which ones relate to Oracle.
    * Reboot your machine.
    * Delete the "C:\Oracle" directory, or whatever directory is your ORACLE_BASE.
    * Delete the "C:\Program Files\Oracle" directory.
    * Empty the contents of your "c:\temp" directory.
    * 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

      Alternatively you can kill them using the kill -9 pid command as the root user.

    * 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...