RFH (req for HELP!) -- Putting the pieces back together...

Hi folks,

Sorry for the crosspost, but I'm new to the lists & wasn't sure which was
more appropriate.

The short story is I'm trying to rescue at least some data from a PG 6.5.1
database that's gone belly up.  I've got a recent (day before I was called
in to help rescue) "core" in data/base/mydb, a pg_log that's almost 1 GB
(the databases themselves, 2 or 3 of them, are only 1-5MB of data), and a PG
engine that thinks no databases exist (\L says "no databases") even though I
can connect to mydb.  Once connected to mydb (through psql), if I "select *
from known_table;", it returns 0 records.  The "known_table" file is still
about 5MB, I'm assuming the data is still actually in there?

Is there *any* hope of recovering the data from those tables?  The last
pg_dump was apparently the one I demonstrated over a week ago.  I was
working on getting them automated and the dumps added to my backup cycle,
but I assumed (yeah, I know <sigh>) that in the meantime the developers were
still manually doing pg_dump's daily or so......  >:-P

Thanks for any pointers, and Happy Holidays (yes, I did put this aside long
enough this weekend to finish decorating the tree and spend some time with
my little girl <g>).

 - Brian Bender
   Part-time (usually the *wrong* times) sysadmin
   Vocollect, Inc.
   Pittsburgh, PA, USA