how to recover after harddisk error

Hi,

Yesterday at about 8pm the harddisk subsystem of our web application
crashed, because of some scsi-error. The system could be restarted today
in the morning, but the database would not come up again. The following
info could be found in the log file.

2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   DEBUG:  database system was interrupted at
2003-02-25 20:19:22 CET
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   DEBUG:  open of
/usr/local/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000001A000000C9 (log file 26, segment
201) failed
: No such file or directory
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   DEBUG:  invalid primary checkpoint record
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   DEBUG:  open of
/usr/local/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000001A000000C8 (log file 26, segment
200) failed
: No such file or directory
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   DEBUG:  invalid secondary checkpoint record
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1291]   FATAL 2:  unable to locate a valid
checkpoint record
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1277]   DEBUG:  startup process (pid 1291) exited
with exit code 2
2003-02-26 09:03:06 [1277]   DEBUG:  aborting startup due to startup
process failure

I did the following steps to get the system running again:

- a new initdb in another data-directory
- create the database again
- restore the data from the last available nightly dump

Is there a better way to get the system running again? Had there been
any way to access the old system again? The steps I did took about 45
min which is quite long (cause the db-dump is rather large) and if there
had been some important data it had been lost...

TIA, peter