Re: IndexSupportInitialize Error

"Bryan Bullard" <bbullard(at)friendlymatrix(dot)com> writes:
> Last week our server's system disk broke causing the server to die a hard d=
> eath. We run Postgres on another disk and the binaries and associated clus=
> ter seemed to have survived. However when I try to connect (psql, dumpdb, =
> dumpall) to any of the databases I get the following error:
> FATAL 1: IndexSupportInitialize: bogus pg_index tuple
> We are running RH 7.3, Postgres 7.2.1 (We were in the process of upgrading =
> our databases - this was the last). A quick search of the archives doesn't=
> uncover much in regard to this problem. Any ideas our there?

*Any* of the databases? Since pg_index isn't shared it's difficult to
imagine a failure scenario that would wipe out all the databases in an
installation in this same way.

The error itself suggests that you've got a zeroed-out row in pg_index.
You could possibly recover by manually dropping the index in question,
if it's not a critical index. What I'd try doing is starting a
standalone backend with the -P switch (ignore system indexes); if that
will let you in, then you'd be able to look through pg_index to try to
determine what's clobbered.

regards, tom lane