Crash Recovery

Oracle performs an automatic crash recovery when the instance is started after a shutdown abort or after a crash.

A crash recovery 'only' uses the online redo log to recover online datafiles.

Crash recovery is the recovery of a database in a single-instance configuration or an Oracle Real Application Clusters configuration in which all instances have crashed. In contrast, instance recovery is the recovery of one failed instance by a live instance in an Oracle Real Application Clusters configuration.