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 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