Possibly corrupted pg_control file after machine crash

Hi

A VM of mine running PostgreSQL 8.3 (from Ubuntu 8.10) died a couple
of nights ago. It was not doing anything at the time, and the
database was on an external (NAS) volume using ext3. When I set up a
new VM with Ubuntu 8.10 and attached the external volume to it, fsck
replayed the journal but was otherwise happy. I ran fsck with the -f
option after that just to make sure and it reported no problems.

Now if I run pg_controldata it complains about the CRC not being
correct on pg_control.

The database had not been modified in quite a while. There is only
one file in pg_clog with a timestamp from the middle of last month.
The newest file in pg_xlog has the same timestamp (actually 6 seconds
newer). The timestamp on pg_control is the same as the latest pg_xlog
file. The only file that's newer is the pgstat.stat file, which is
timestamped about the time of the crash (I got an alert at 01:24:39.)

-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16384 Jun 17 12:59 pg_clog/0000
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 16777216 Jun 17 12:59
pg_xlog/00000001000000000000001B
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 8192 Jun 17 12:59 global/pg_control
-rw------- 1 postgres postgres 42664 Jul 2 01:19 global/pgstat.stat

I also have a snapshot of the external volume from the 25th of June,
but the pg_control file is identical to the one on the volume.

I don't understand why the pg_control file might be corrupted (or what
else could be the problem). Is there some way I can recover from
this?

Here's the output from pg_controldata:
WARNING: Calculated CRC checksum does not match value stored in file.
Either the file is corrupt, or it has a different layout than this program
is expecting. The results below are untrustworthy.

pg_control version number: 833
Catalog version number: 200711281
Database system identifier: 5325665671964054206
Database cluster state: in production
pg_control last modified: Thu 01 Jan 1970 02:00:00 AM SAST
Latest checkpoint location: 4A38CC9A/0
Prior checkpoint location: 0/1B0FC7E8
Latest checkpoint's REDO location: 0/1B0EE650
Latest checkpoint's TimeLineID: 0
Latest checkpoint's NextXID: 454019048/1
Latest checkpoint's NextOID: 0
Latest checkpoint's NextMultiXactId: 50322
Latest checkpoint's NextMultiOffset: 24576
Time of latest checkpoint: Thu 01 Jan 1970 02:00:01 AM SAST
Minimum recovery ending location: 0/4A38CC94
Maximum data alignment: 0
Database block size: 8
Blocks per segment of large relation: 0
WAL block size: 0
Bytes per WAL segment: 1093850759
Maximum length of identifiers: 8192
Maximum columns in an index: 131072
Maximum size of a TOAST chunk: 8192
Date/time type storage: 64-bit integers
Maximum length of locale name: 64
LC_COLLATE:
LC_CTYPE:

Note that the LC_COLLATE and LC_CTYPE fields appear to be blank.
Also, the timestamps and some other fields seem to be zeroed. (My
time zone is UTC+2).

If I look at the file, though, I see the locale information is in there:
# strings /var/lib/postgresql/8.3/main/global/pg_control
en_US.UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8

Any hints? :)

Thanks.

--
Michael <esiotrot(at)gmail(dot)com>