"ORA-15040: diskgroup is incomplete" but diskgroup is mounted

Those days, I was creating a new database on a system and when I tried to create any file (spfile / pwfile / control file) on diskgroup, I started receiving the error below:

ORA-15001: diskgroup "DATA" does not exist or is not mounted
ORA-15040: diskgroup is incomplete

Usually this error comes together with something like ORA-15042: ASM disk "1" is missing from group number "1", but in my case, there was no disk error. Also, the more strange thing is that all the diskgroups were mounted on all instances.

After researching, I discovered that this error is caused because oracle user does no have the necessary privilegies to handle the ASM disks.

So, checking the privileges:

# ls -la /dev/oracleasm/disks
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root           0 Mar 19  2015 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root           0 Mar 19  2015 ..
brw-rw---- 1 grid asmadmin 253,  3 Mar 19  2015 ARCHIVE
brw-rw---- 1 grid asmadmin 253,  2 Mar 19  2015 DATA
brw-rw---- 1 grid asmadmin 253,  5 Mar 19  2015 REDO01
brw-rw---- 1 grid asmadmin 253,  8 Mar 19  2015 REDO02

# id -a oracle
uid=101(oracle) gid=501(oinstall) groups=501(oinstall),502(dba),503(oper),505(asmdba)

# id -a grid
uid=102(grid) gid=501(oinstall) groups=501(oinstall),502(dba),504(asmadmin),505(asmdba),506(asmoper)

$ ls -la $ORACLE_HOME/bin/oracle
-rwsr-s--x 1 oracle asmadmin 239882703 Apr 15 2015 /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.4/dbhome_1/bin/oracle

They were exactly as expected.

So, as a try, I added oracle user to asmadmin group in the OS to check if this could solve my problem:

# gpasswd -a oracle asmadmin

After restarting the instance, surprisingly my issue was solved.

Having oracle as an ASM admin is not a concern in my administration model as the DBA is also the Grid Administrator.

If you have the same issue, check if this solves your problem.

+35