Re: FATAL error after a system crash

Tom Lane wrote:

>Feng-Cheng Chang <breeze(at)alumni(dot)nctu(dot)edu(dot)tw> writes:
>
>
>>"FATAL 1: cannot open pg_variable: no such file or directory"
>>and terminates the connection.
>>
>>
>
>Well, if that's the only problem, you got (very) lucky. 7.1.* doesn't
>actually use pg_variable, but there is still vestigial code in it that
>tries to open that file during startup. All you need is an empty file
>of the right name, so try
>
> touch $PGDATA/global/1264
>
>But I fear that'll just let you get to the next problem :-(. If Windoze
>managed to lose that file, it probably managed to lose other stuff too.
>If it does seem to start up okay, I'd recommend trying to do pg_dumpall,
>and then initdb and reload if the dump process doesn't show errors.
>
Things went like what you said....
I started postmaster and connected to it using psql without error
messages. When I tried to pg_dumpall or pg_dump, the message "cannot
open pg_inherits: no such file or directory" appeared. Although I
couldn't dump the database, I use SQL COPY to save all needed tables to
files :-D After the table-by-table recovery, my application was back!

Thank you for your great help :-)

>>Win2k server
>>cygwin + postgresql 7.1.3
>>
>>
>
>This is not a production-grade setup IMHO. If you don't want to run
>a real OS to put Postgres on top of, you'd better be a lot more
>religious about backing up.
>
I don't think it is a good setup, either. If I had a spare machine, I
would like to install a UNIX-like system and move my application to it.
Anyway, thank you for your suggestion. I'll never forget to backup
periodically :-)

--
Feng-Cheng Chang (張 峰 誠)
Ph.D. Student of
Communication Electronics & Signal Processing Laboratory,
Institute of Electronics, NCTU, Taiwan, R.O.C.
E-mail: fcchang(dot)ee88g(at)nctu(dot)edu(dot)tw