Re: Corrupted table

On Mon, 8 Oct 2001, Tom Lane wrote:

> Robert Mosher <mosher(at)andrews(dot)edu> writes:
> > In a Perl script I ended up trying to UPDATE a row in my database with a
> > value that was out of the range. Now whenever I try to do something with
> > the table I get the error:
>
> > ERROR: mdopen: couldn't open tablename: No such file or directory
>
> It seems unlikely that the one led to the other. The known ways to
> cause that type of failure involve other things, like trying to roll
> back a DROP TABLE.
>
> How old is your Postgres?
>
> > I can't even drop the table, despite the fact that it shows up when I
> > enter '\dt' in psql. I could probably run destroydb on the
> > database that contains the table,
>
> If it's called "destroydb" and not "dropdb", then the answer to my
> question is "too old". Consider an update, soon.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
>

Well I didn't kill it, though it did shut itself down at one
point after trying to access the corrupted database. Trying to insert the
out of range value was the last thing that happened before the problems
started, so I have no other ideas to what may have caused it though.

So no suggestions to recover things, or at least only kill the one table,
and not the entire database?

Thanks,
Rob Mosher