ANSWER:

As I recall, Oracle database files (and binary backups) are OS dependent. You could access that DB if you dropped those disks into another Linux server, but you won’t be able to utilize them on any non-Linux OS.

If you need them on a different Operating System, I’d recommend putting the disks into a different server or another Linux box, bring Oracle up, run an ASCII backup, then migrate that to your other Operating System.

by Christopher Cashell from http://serverfault.com/questions/376170