How to uninstall / completely remove Oracle 11g (client)?

Yves picture Yves · Dec 9, 2011 · Viewed 451.7k times · Source

How to uninstall / completely remove Oracle 11g (client)?

deinstall.bat doesn't work.

Edit: Further discussion related to why this question was closed and deleted: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/190441/why-was-this-question-related-to-uninstalling-the-oracle-database-client-deleted

Answer

ziesemer picture ziesemer · Dec 9, 2011

Assuming a Windows installation, do please refer to this:

http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/misc/ManualOracleUninstall.php

  • Uninstall all Oracle components using the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI).
  • Run regedit.exe and delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE key. This contains registry entires for all Oracle products.
  • Delete any references to Oracle services left behind in the following part of the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ora* It should be pretty obvious which ones relate to Oracle.
  • Reboot your machine.
  • Delete the "C:\Oracle" directory, or whatever directory is your ORACLE_BASE.
  • Delete the "C:\Program Files\Oracle" directory.
  • Empty the contents of your "C:\temp" directory.
  • Empty your recycle bin.

Calling additional attention to some great comments that were left here:

  • Be careful when following anything listed here (above or below), as doing so may remove or damage any other Oracle-installed products.
  • For 64-bit Windows (x64), you need also to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ORACLE key from the registry.
  • Clean-up by removing any related shortcuts that were installed to the Start Menu.
  • Clean-up environment variables:
    • Consider removing %ORACLE_HOME%.
    • Remove any paths no longer needed from %PATH%.

This set of instructions happens to match an almost identical process that I had reverse-engineered myself over the years after a few messed-up Oracle installs, and has almost always met the need.

Note that even if the OUI is no longer available or doesn't work, simply following the remaining steps should still be sufficient.

(Revision #7 reverted as to not misquote the original source, and to not remove credit to the other comments that contributed to the answer. Further edits are appreciated (and then please remove this comment), if a way can be found to maintain these considerations.)