Oracle Home Inventory Issue

I was in the process of applying iAS Rollup 5 patch to our oracle applications environment. Despite following the steps to apply the patch, where in oracle_home, classpath, jdk home etc are set, the installer refused to continue with the following error:

"Not able to find ORACLE_HOME to be patched in the inventory please set the same properly and try again.."

There was a suggestion to create "Global Inventory" by applying the OUI patch and stuff, but i thought there should be a way to get past this without having to recreate the global inventory.

Here is how i fixed the issue:

- set the environment variable %ORAINST% to point to the directory that contained the inventory.xml file under %program files%\oui\..... This would ensure that the installer of the rollup patch would look for the inventory.xml in this location. (We have alternative location created by different oracle software installation)
- Most Importantly, edited the Oracle_Home name information in inventory.xml to read consistent with the information in the registry, ie HKLM\Software\Oracle\Home1(which is the $IAS_ORACLE_HOME). For some reason, the home names were inconsistent and which is why we saw the error stated above.
- Then I ran the installer and yes, the installation completed successfully.
- How do I know? ==>
- Log file of the installation.
- cd $IAS_ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache
- apache -v
- Output confirms that rup5 was successfully installed.

- Aravind Kamath