Re: $PGDATA/global hosed but database still there ... what to do?

Most flavors of Unix allow one to delete a file/directory while other processes are accessing them. Not a problem as whether a file is deleted or not is only an entry in the Volume Table Of Contents (VTOC) track on the drive. A df, or dbf if your on HP-UX, will return the amount of free space that the drive actually has. How that happens I'm not exactly sure but trust me on this one. Anyway, your disk volume is probably still showing the original disk burn & will continue to do so UNTIL you shutdown the database. Thereafter the disk space your database occupies will really become free & the database will disappear for good. You might try doing a pgdump on the database right now before you really loose it.

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
Oracle Certified 8i DBA
-----Original Message-----
From: Sincero, Arcadio (ASINCERO) [mailto:ASINCERO(at)arinc(dot)com]
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 6:38 PM
To: 'pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org'
Subject: [ADMIN] $PGDATA/global hosed but database still there ... what to do?

For reasons I have yet to figure out, my "$PGDATA/global" directory was wiped out (as in completely empty). (I'm sure it has nothing to do with Postgresql itself but has something to do with the way I'm synchronizing the database on one box to a mirror of the database on another box, i.e. the Wrong Way). However, the database itself appears to still be intact. Is there anyway I can reconstruct the contents of the "global" directory so I can get at the data or am I totally S.O.L. and the only recourse is to reinitialize the db?

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

- Arcadio