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 re-install. If you make any mistakes they can be quite destructive so be careful.
In the past I've had many problems uninstalling all Oracle products from Windows systems. Here's my last resort method:
regedit.exe
and delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Oracle
key. This contains registry entires for all Oracle products.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/Oracle
key if it exists.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/Ora*
). It should be pretty obvious which ones relate to Oracle.C:\Oracle
" directory, or whatever directory is your ORACLE_BASE.C:\Program Files\Oracle
" directory.C:\Program Files (x86)\Oracle
" directory.C:\temp
" directory.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.
If some DLLs can't be deleted, try renaming them, the after a reboot delete them.
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:
Stop any outstanding processes using the appropriate utilities.
$ dbshut $ORACLE_HOMEAlternatively 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
If you are getting rid of the inventory, delete the "/u01/app/oraInventory" directory and "/etc/orainst.loc" file. If you were planning to keep the inventory location, you will need to edit the "/u01/app/oraInventory/ContentsXML/inventory.xml" to remove any removed homes.
# rm -Rf /u01/app/oraInventory /etc/orainst.loc
Hope this helps. Regards Tim...
Back to normal view: https://oracle-base.com/articles/misc/manual-oracle-uninstall