Tag Archives: OPatch failed to locate Central Inventory

Recreating your Oracle Inventory

Oracle December 30, 2011

From 10g onwards, you can reverse engineer and recreate your Oracle inventory if it gets corrupted or  accidentally deleted, thereby avoiding  time consuming re-installation of Oracle S/W  or any other unsupported tricks.

If Oracle inventory is corrupted or missing, you generally get the  below  error when opatch command is issued.

=============================================

oracle@myhost:/app/oracle$ opatch lsinventory
Invoking OPatch 11.2.0.1.6

Oracle Interim Patch Installer version 11.2.0.1.6
Copyright (c) 2011, Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Oracle Home                   : /app/oracle/product/10.2/db
Central Inventory           : /app/oracleai/oraInventory
from                                : /etc/oraInst.loc
OPatch version               : 11.2.0.1.6
OUI version                     : 10.2.0.3.0
Log file location               : /app/oracle/product/10.2/db/cfgtoollogs/opatch/opatch2011-12-27_13-19-08PM.log

OPatch failed to locate Central Inventory.
Possible causes are:
The Central Inventory is corrupted
The oraInst.loc file specified is not valid.
LsInventorySession failed: OPatch failed to locate Central Inventory.
Possible causes are:
The Central Inventory is corrupted
The oraInst.loc file specified is not valid.

OPatch failed with error code 73
oracle@myhost:/app/oracle$

=============================================

..

..

You may also get this error because of  incorrect inventory location.  So  it is a good idea to make sure the location of inventory is specified correctly  in one of the following files depending upon you OS.

.

  1. /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc
  2. /etc/oraInst.loc

.

Contents of oraInst.loc

bash-3.2$ cat /etc/oraInst.loc
inventory_loc=/app/oraInventory
inst_group=dba

..

If the error occurred due to missing or corrupt inventory, then you can recreate the inventory following the steps below.

  1. Backup your existing oracle corrupted  inventory  if it exists.
  2. Run the following OUI command from the Oracle home  whose inventory is corrupt or missing.

cd $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin

./runInstaller -silent –attachHome ORACLE_HOME=”/app/oracle/product/10.2/db” ORACLE_HOME_NAME=”Ora10202Home”

Note: Even though –attachHome was introduced with OUI version 10.1, it is  doucumented with  OUI 10.2 and higher.