Restarting postgres server

Hi all.

I just modified my pg_hba.conf file in order to allow
access from another machine. I needed to restart the
postgres server in order for the changes to take
effect, and so I issued the command,

pg_ctl restart -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

But the server failed to shutdown. The database was
not accessible either. So I restarted the server
machine, and now when I try to access the database
using,

psql mydatabase postgres

it gives me the error,
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or
directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket
"/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

I have a lot of data in there, so I dont want to get
it erased. Any ideas of how I can get this working, if
I need to restart the postmaster, what would be the
command? I am just a beginner with this thing, so
please bear with me.

Thanks in advance.
George

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