After the Grid Infrastructure (GI) upgrade, database fail to start with ORA-01017 due to wrong group setup

(Doc ID 1922050.1)

Last updated on JANUARY 31, 2018

Applies to:

Oracle Database - Enterprise Edition - Version 11.2.0.1 and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Symptoms

The Grid Infrastructure was upgraded to 11.2 or higher.  The upgrade completed almost until the end when the database failed to start.

All resources except database started up fine from new upgraded home, but the database failed to start due to the following error:

/oracle/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbs $srvctl start database -d <db name>
PRCR-1079 : Failed to start resource ora.<db name>.db
CRS-5017: The resource action "ora.<db name>.db start" encountered the following error:
ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters
ORA-01565: error in identifying file '+DATADG/<db name>/spfile<db name>.ora'
ORA-17503: ksfdopn:2 Failed to open file +DATADG/<db name>/spfile<db name>.ora
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

Trying to start the database using sqlplus also failed with the same error.

Cause

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