Re: Regarding Vacuumdb

Before doing anything so drastic, you may want to check the archives for
recent messages on a similar error.   IIRC, this problem can be caused by
rolling back a "drop table" command.  The effect is that the table structure
in the database remains, but the physical file is gone.
The fix is to create a file with the correct name in the data directory for
that database, then drop the table.
If you are running version 7.1, the trick will be to figure out the correct
name for that file.  You can find discussion on that in the archives too.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shaun Thomas" <sthomas@townnews.com>
To: <shan@ceedees.com>
Cc: <pgsql-jdbc@postgresql.org>; <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Regarding Vacuumdb


> On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Bhuvaneswari wrote:
>
> > hi,
> > I am getting the following error while doing vacuumdb,
> >
> > ERROR: mdopen: couldn't open test1: No such file or directory
> > vacuumdb: database vacuum failed on db1.
>
> We got this error a lot in 6.5.  Usually it means your table has somehow
> been corrupted, and postgres doesn't want anything to do with it.  It'll
> show up, and you can even select from it, but doing so will crash the
> back-end, and you can't run a vacuum or pg_dump on that database
> successfully.
>
> You'll have to do a table-by-table pg_dump, destroy the DB, and reimport
> everything.  You'll have to rebuild the corrupted table from scratch,
> since you might not be able to dump it.
>
> Either way, it's a lot of work.  Just be careful.
>
> --
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> | Shaun M. Thomas                INN Database Programmer              |
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> | Email: sthomas@townnews.com    AIM  : trifthen                      |
> | Web  : hamster.lee.net                                              |
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