Oracle DBW Terminating Instance – Troubleshooting Guide

I was performing routine administrative tasks on an Oracle instance and I was not able to connect to it.

I proceeded to do as follows to reach a diagnosis:

1. I checked for Oracle processes in memory and saw that the instance was down.
2. I tried to startup the instance but it never responded to the startup command. It simply stalled. No output or feedback, no matter how long I wait. Only a kill -9 can get me out of it.

3. I reviewed the alert log and the last message was 3 days ago:

   "DBW0: terminating instance due to error 472
   Instance terminated by DBW0, pid = 14952"
   

Questions

• What can cause BDW to terminate an instance?
• Why I don't get any feedback, whether in the sqlplus console or the alert log when I try to startup the instance.

When I ran strace, I got this:

ERROR: unable to open /dev/log.

I'm running Oracle on SunOS 5.8 Generic_117350-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire. The RDBMS version is 9.2.0.8.0

EDIT:

I followed advice from both @balazs-papp and @jsapkota about running truss:

When I run truss on the sqlplus the I try to startup the instance, I get this output:

read(0, " s t a r t u p\n", 1024)               = 8
write(9, "\0 U\0\006\0\0\0\0\0038A".., 85)      = 85
read(10, 0x10029A536, 2064)     (sleeping...)
signotifywait()                 (sleeping...)
lwp_cond_wait(0xFFFFFFFF7D62B058, 0xFFFFFFFF7D62B068, 0xFFFFFFFF7D621C80) (sleeping...)
lwp_cond_wait(0xFFFFFFFF7D62B058, 0xFFFFFFFF7D62B068, 0xFFFFFFFF7D621C80) (sleeping...)
door_return(0x00000000, 0, 0x00000000, 0) (sleeping...)

• How can I interpret this output? It's totally cryptic to me.