Re: Recovering databases

On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 14:04 +0200, Peter Falk wrote:
> The installation is Debian Sarge (3.1). I did a complete update, but
> during this I got the information, that Postgresql has to be upgraded
> separately - can't remember the exact words.
>
> I did this update and to my suprise it installed a version 7.4. Then i
> removed this installation and installed a version 8.1. Afterwards I
> cheched to see the packages installed and recognized, that some
> 7.4-packages still resided om the server.
>
> I there upon (and this is when the big mistake occured) decided to
> remove all PG-packages and do a clean install.
> The misson succeded but the patient died!
>
> At this moment I got a runing PG but without connecion to the old
> databases. The database-files still resides on the server, but I can't
> get PG to recognize them.
>
> I think that the PG-installation prior to the mistake was v. 8.0 - I
> know for sure that it was newer than 7.x

In that case you should install postgresql-8.0 and
postgresql-client-8.0. That should enable you to get access to your
8.0 database. Unfortunately, they aren't available from the Debian
archive, although they were available in testing for a while before 8.1
came out. They should still exist somewhere on the web.

What puzzles me though is that you are/were running Sarge. The latest
version of postgresql in Sarge is 7.4 (and the current stable release of
Debian is Etch, which has PostgreSQL 8.1). "Doing a complete update"
will presumably have upgraded you to Etch. In Sarge, the postgresql
packages were of version 7.4 but 7.4 did not appear in their names; the
fact that the upgrade to Etch installed *-7.4 packages suggests to me
that you were in fact running 7.4 in Sarge, because the *-7.4 packages
would have been needed to achieve a smooth upgrade. (The postgresql
package in Etch is a transitional package that depends on
postgresql-7.4.)

To check on the version you want, check the contents of the file
PG_VERSION in the database directory. If you are right, it should say
8.0

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