Part II – Installing Oracle 10gR2

I had a spare Windows 7 32-bit PC with a 300GB SATA hard disk and this surplus hardware is what I wanted to use to create my ASM sandbox. My initial thought was to download and install Oracle 11gR2 for Windows 32-bit, but this is not an option. When trying to use DBCA to create a database using ASM, the assistant helpfully informs you:

Cannot use ASM for database storage due to following reason: Grid infrastructure or Clusterware home not found. ASM should be running under this home

This is due to Oracle removing Clusterware support in the Windows 32-bit release:

For Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.1), Oracle ACFS and Oracle ADVM are supported only on Windows Server 2003 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 R2 64-bit. Starting with Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.2), Oracle ACFS and Oracle ADVM are also supported on Windows Server 2008, x64 and Windows Server 2008 R2, x64.

Source: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e16773/oraclerestart.htm#CIHCBGCC

I didn’t have a Windows 64-bit license and I didn’t want to spend the money to get one just for a sandbox. I could install Linux x86 64-bit but that is something I want to do when I have a second hard disk to play with, and a certain flood in Thailand is making that option tricky right now.

Instead I decided to try the 10gR2 (10.2.0.1) release on my Windows 7 machine. This path quickly ran into some problems when the installer failed with:

Abnormal program termination. An internal error has occurred. Please provide the following files to Oracle Support: “unknown”

Not exactly a very helpful message.

The problem here is that Oracle 10g was developed for the Windows XP/Server 2003 technology platform, and since then the fellows at Microsoft have made some substantial changes to the security of the Windows product.

In order to make the 10g installer run under Windows 7, we must launch it in Windows XP compatibility mode by right-clicking on the setup.exe program and selecting the “Compatibility” tab and then setting the compatibility to Windows XP (Service Pack 2):

The installer now runs normally, and allows us to install the Oracle 10g software. Since we want to create an ASM sandbox, I recommend installing the Enterprise Edition software but with no database for now.

Note: We only need to install the Oracle 10gR2 software. We do not need the Companion CD or any other installs for this sandbox.