The other day, I had some spare time to kill, so I decided to install recently released Oracle 11.2 ASM on one of my Windows 2003 x64 sandbox. I didn’t expect that I’ll end-up troubleshooting installment for the rest of the day. What happened?

I first installed ASM from 11.2 Grid infrastructure “CD” to Oracle home D:\ORACLE\ORA11R2GRID with “Install and Configure Grid Infrastructure for a Standalone Server” installation option. Then, I changed my mind and decided to remove R2 from the Oracle home name (if you’re asking why I’m not using Oracle defaults…->did I mention that I hate Oracle stupid default paths? I’m all for OFA “rules”, just not the Oracle ones – especially on Windows! ;-)).
No problem, I whispered to myself. I launched OUI and selected ORA11R2GRID for de-installation, OUI instructed me that I need to run deinstall script from \ORA11R2GRID\deinstall directory. Which I did. All went well and ORA11R2GRID home was gone, or so I thought. Launched setup from grid “CD” again and repeated installation, this time in different home, D:\ORACLE\ORA11GRID. All went well until I hit the error at step “Grid Infrastructure configuration”:

[INS-20802] Grid Infrastructure Configuration failed.

as shown on picture:

…needless to say that I checked OUI log:

…there was nothing in the log that would help me find the root cause of the problem. I repeated installation several times, trying different things to identify the problem.

Finally, I sorted the Oracle inventory log files based on timestamp in descending order and in addition to installations* log files noticed additional logs, with more reassuring names, such as asmcadc_check*.log. As soon as I opened the last generated asmcadc_check log file I knew what might be causing the problem. At the end of the log I spotted reference to now non-existing home (ORA11R2GRID):

....
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:09.609 PDT ] [WindowsSystem.dorunRemoteExecCmd:2061]  _WS_: Calling windowsNative with cmd: D:\ORACLE\ORA11GRID\bin\getcrshome.exe
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:10.625 PDT ] [WindowsSystem.dorunRemoteExecCmd:2064]  _WS_: WinNative returned: true
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:10.625 PDT ] [HAUtils.getCRSHome:594]  Configured CRS/HAS home = D:\ORACLE\ORA11R2GRID
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:10.625 PDT ] [HAUtils.getCRSHome:572]  returning CRS Home: D:\ORACLE\ORA11R2GRID
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:10.625 PDT ] [ASMUtils.checkASMExistence:562]  Exception in method:checkASMExistencePRCI-1113 : Directory D:\ORACLE\ORA11R2GRID does not exist
[main] [ 2010-04-13 09:38:13.953 PDT ] [USMCheckConfig.checkConfigInternal:177]  ASM was not detected in the Oracle Home  

I opened regedt32 and checked HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE for orphaned keys. I noticed that Oracle de-installation procedure didn’t remove HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\ocr key which was pointing to non-existing grid infrastructure home, D:\ORACLE\ORA11R2GRID. After I deleted the ocr key I repeated the Grid infrastructure installation for single server and this time around “Grid Infrastructure Configuration” step succeeded.

I guess troubleshooting episode such as this is (now and then!) acceptable “collateral damage” for going with the “my way” of doing things. Or is it just a convenient excuse for schallabweiserrei?:-)