startup mount issues with Oracle I am trying to simply shutdown and restart an Oracle db instance on a Windows Server 2008 machine (Oracle 11.2.0).  Logged in via sqlplus, I issue the command shutdown immediate;.  I get the

Database closed.  
Database dismounted.  
ORACLE instance shut down


reponses.  I exit out of sqlplus, and try to log back in (ORACLE_SID is set correctly) so I can issue the startup mount; command, but I get the 

ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor


error.  All of the Windows services involving my database dantest3 are started.  Doing research, I found the oradim command, but while that starts my database and allowing me to login, that is the full startup, and I want to only be in "mount" mode.

I am logging in with the following command - 

sqlplus sys/[passwordforacct]@dantest3 as sysdba


If I try the simple sqlplus / as sydba, I get a 

ORA-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error


oradim command - 

oradim -start -sid dantest3


Requested variables -

TNS_ADMIN = C:\Oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1\NETWORK\ADMIN
ORACLE_SID = dantest3
ORACLE_HOME_11gR2 = C:\Oracle\product\11.2.0\dbhome_1
Is the environment variable LOCAL set? this will cause sqlplus to connect to a TNS alias instead of directly to the local database instance.  

Your other problem with starting it into mount, you are missing a parameter to oradim -STARTTYPE srvc.  All of the options can be seen by typing oradim /?

to start just the service so that you can manually start to mount use

oradim -start -sid dantest3 -starttype srvc


At this point the database will not be registered with the listener so you will still need to connect without using the listener.