Re: Postrgres data restoration problem

Jim Cochrane <jtc(at)dim(dot)com> writes:
>> How old? We need to know the exact PG version number.

> cat PG_VERSION
> 7.2

That's not exact, it only tells the major release number.
"postmaster --version" was what I was looking for.

> However the server failed to start up, giving the following error messages:

> postmaster successfully started
> DEBUG: database system was shut down at 2003-12-07 14:55:22 MST
> DEBUG: open of /home/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000000000000000 (log file 0, segment 0) failed: No such file or directory
> DEBUG: invalid primary checkpoint record
> DEBUG: open of /home/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000000000000000 (log file 0, segment 0) failed: No such file or directory
> DEBUG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
> FATAL 2: unable to locate a valid checkpoint record
> DEBUG: startup process (pid 31411) exited with exit code 2
> DEBUG: aborting startup due to startup process failure

This is ungood :-(. Your only hope at this point is to run pg_resetxlog
(which is not a standard part of the 7.2 distribution, but is available
as a contrib utility). If you are lucky, that will let you into the
database, but you should be aware of the possibility that you've lost
parts of the last few transactions and therefore have a
not-completely-consistent database.

regards, tom lane