Allocating and attaching to shared memory...FAILED

Allocating and attaching to shared memory...FAILED

Dear All,
if you are at this blog, it means taht you have already been to many places and it still is not working for you. first note that if the sysmaster database is correctly installed. if you are getting this error it means that it is not installed properly.

First let me tell you how i got here ...

installed unix, installed the N/w card driver, SCSI card driver (for tape drive), the tape drive was mounted.
we installed the secondary master HDD to install all of our applications, the primary drive was for UNIX only.
we installed i4gl from install4gl program.
we installed DB from ./instlows

this is where we were stuck.... unable to install sysmaster database, try again? i said YES, configuring complete, launch the

database server PROBLEM, i tried reinstalling but to no avail. so i proceeded.
tried oninit -v.
Allocating and attaching to shared memory...FAILED

so i uninstalled the Informix DB through the /bin/uninstlows. It also uninstalled/deleted some of my informix files,

so i installed the i4gl through ./install4gl
after that instead of installing DB from the mounted Cd drive, i copied the contents of the Cd on my root drive "/" (primary master where UNIX is installed). there i had to give execute rights to root for the 2 files
chmod u+x instlows
chmod u+x setup.sh

then i ran the ./instlows. This time again the sysmaster database didn't install correctly, so i exited the setup without moving

on to next step of configuring and launching my server.
after exiting, i had to fix the entries in my /ifmx.sh i changed that to the SERVER name i gave when i was installing

the DB.

HERE I listened to Joe The guru (http://www.iiug.org/forums/ids/index.cgi/noframes/read/1312)... he writes ...

The most frequent cause of this error is when the shared memory segments you are trying to create when starting the engine already exist. Look in the online log for an error 17 - that means the segments already exists.
That means either the engine is already running (run 'ps -ef' and look for any oninit processes running), or shared memory segments have been left orphaned by the operating system even if the oninits aren't running.
Run an 'ipcs -m' and look for a segment with a key starting with 5258. Specifically, 52584801.
If that exists, you'll have to remove it (them) before you start your engine (see your System Admin for that).

i checked the processes with ipcs -ma and then I removed all the processes which started with 52 and had user informix in them.

now i did oninit -v .... and VOILA !!! it worked, i went to dbaccess and PROBLEMS, i restarted the PC and then dbaccess, the

database was working...