recovery from out of disk space

I use PostGre 8.3 on Ubuntu.

I realized last Friday that my /opt hard disk was full. The disk was full about
2-4 hours of moderate activity. The disk ran out of space for reasons outside
of postgres

I'm really at a loss of what to do. Does anyone have suggestions for what my
next step should be. T

More details:

When I run postgress...Postgres seems to come up...However, it is completely
unresponsive to my application. Everything just hangs.

postgres 7364 0.0 1.5 1089056 27164 ? S 09:35 0:00
/opt/PostgreSQL/8.3/bin/postgres -D /opt/PostgreSQL/8.3/data
postgres 7365 0.0 0.0 10700 984 ? Ss 09:35 0:00 postgres:
logger process

postgres 7367 0.0 0.4 1089572 7244 ? Ss 09:35 0:00 postgres:
writer process

postgres 7368 0.0 0.0 1089572 1056 ? Ss 09:35 0:00 postgres: wal
writer process

postgres 7369 0.0 0.0 1089712 1348 ? Ss 09:35 0:00 postgres:
autovacuum launcher process

postgres 7370 0.0 0.0 10828 1236 ? Ss 09:35 0:00 postgres: stats
collector process

I also tried to run pg_dump to make a backup and that failed with the following
message:

(reverse-i-search)`./.': cd ../../
root(at)domU-12-31-39-0F-44-82:/opt/PostgreSQL/8.3/bin# p -v -c -f
/opt/backup/bb.txt -U nuxeo nuxeodb
pg_dump: reading schemas
pg_dump: reading user-defined functions
pg_dump: reading user-defined types
pg_dump: reading procedural languages
pg_dump: reading user-defined aggregate functions
pg_dump: reading user-defined operators
pg_dump: reading user-defined operator classes
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search parsers
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search templates
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search dictionaries
pg_dump: reading user-defined text search configurations
pg_dump: reading user-defined operator families
pg_dump: reading user-defined conversions
pg_dump: reading user-defined tables
pg_dump: SQL command failed
pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR: permission denied for relation
totalcount
pg_dump: The command was: LOCK TABLE public.totalcount IN ACCESS SHARE MODE
pg_dump: *** aborted because of error