Error Oracle Not available

Many times Oracle will not startup upon restart. Go to Windows Services and see if Oracle is started. If not, highlight the oracle instance and "start service".

If started, connect to SQL*PLUS, as privileged user and "start" the database.

I am not certain that oracle 8i is supported on windows 2003. This in itself may be a cause of problems.

It is possible that if you can not get the service to start on reboot, that it won't be able to ever. There was a microsoft patch that caused the service to hang on startup before Windows 2003 came out. There was never a fix for this issue from oracle that I am aware of as they were to busy rolling out 10g.
A telltale sign is that you should see the service status as "starting" instead of "started". You can still use oracle's server manager tool to startup the database. A batch file could be used to do the same on reboot, I believe.

Oracle 8i is desupported. Also Oracle 8i has never been certified against Windows 2003, as Windows 2003 didn't exist when Oracle 8i was released, and Oracle doesn't necessarily certify against newer versions of an O/S. Also Windows has a bad record of not being fully downwards compatible. In short: you are on your own.

Hello MAn.
I do met wth this problem before. Sometimes this do happens wth me that when I install 8i then even after complete successful installatio nI also use dto face the same error. It occurs due to your OS status. I don't know the reason why this occurs but I can tell u the sol to make it run.
If u uninstall the 8i and again re-install, then again u r going to get the same error. The best practise is Re-install your Windows first and then 8i. This will definitely make u in work.

Let me see if I understand this correct. YOu installed Oracle 8i on Windows 2003 server. After the install you were able to get to the SQL Plus prompt. After you restart the server you can not get to the SQL Plus prompt? Can you check your env and make sure you are sourcing your env correctly? If the env is sourced correctly it might be the fact that the instacne is not up and running. In Windows env even if the Service for your instance was started automatically on re-boot it doesnt mean the instance was automatically started up. There is a registry entry called ORA__AUTOSTART that is created on install. The default value is FALSE. This tells the Oracle Service wether or not to start up the database instance automatically when the service starts. If this is the case you can change the value to TRUE and re-start the service from the control panel. or you can connect to SQLPLUS "/as sysdba" and startup the instance. Hope this helps.
Best of Luck!

Start-->cmd (press enter)-->svrmgrl (press enter) --> connect (press enter)--> Here it will ask username and password--> type name as 'internal' and password as 'oracle' then press enter--> startup (press enter)

There ends the matter and problem solved.

Start-->cmd (press enter)-->svrmgrl (press enter) --> connect (press enter)--> Here it will ask username and password--> type name as 'internal' and password as 'oracle' then press enter--> startup (press enter)

There ends the matter and problem solved.