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Forgot SYS password

EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Brian Peasland

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QUESTION POSED ON: 10 July 2006
When I try to log in as SYS, I am getting an access denied error. I am probably giving the wrong password, and I have forgotten the SYS password. I want to change some INITSID.ORA parameter values. Now since I forgot the password, I can't change the values, and I can't restart the server since all these activities need the SYS password. While the Oracle server is running I deleted the password file (PWDSID.ORA). I re-created the PWDSID.ORA file with the ORAPWD command and tried to log in, but it looks like for the new password to be effective, I need to restart the Oracle server. If I restart the Windows server (hard boot), will the Oracle instance get started automatically (Windows Oracle sid service is set to start automatically)? If I reboot the Windows server, will the Oracle instance start automatically by picking the new SYS password set in the PWDSID.ORA file?

EXPERT RESPONSE
Log on to your Windows server as a member of the Administrators group or a member of the ORA_DBA group. At that point, you can sign on to the database as SYS without a password by doing the following:

sqlplus /nolog
connect / as sysdba

Once connected, you can change the SYS password to something you know:

ALTER USER sys IDENTIFIED BY new_password;

You do not need to reboot the server for this.

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