Manual Oracle Uninstall

I found this article on http://www.oracle-base.com on how to remove oracle database manually.

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

In RHEL4, I also remove /etc/oraInst.loc and oracle inventory file. $HOME/oraInventory.