# ASM and ORA-29701: Unable to connect to Cluster Manager

I was recently at a client. They told me that the Oracle database binaries were installed and that they wanted an ASM instance created and a couple of disk groups. Easy enough...  
  
Every time I would try to start an ASM instance I would get this error:  
ORA-29701: Unable to connect to Cluster Manager  
  
It turns out that this machine was a clone of another machine and that the binaries weren't installed, but cloned from another machine. I don't ever do it that way, so I was at a bit of a loss. I finally found a solution. From the $ORACLE\_HOME/bin directory I ran  
  
localconfig delete  
localconfig add  
  
This took care of the problem. Hope this helps.