Re: Strange database corruption with PostgreSQL 7.4.x on

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 14:34 +0200, Matthias.Pitzl@izb.de wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We're running the latest release of PostgreSQL 7.4.13 on a Debian Sarge
> machine. Postgres has been compiled by oureselves.
> We have a pretty big database running on this machine, it has about 6.4 GB
> approximately. One table contains about 55 million rows.
> Into this table we insert about 500000 rows each day. Our problem is that
> without any obvious reason the database gets corrupt. The messages we get
> are:
> invalid page header in block 437702 of relation "xxxx"
> We already have tried out some other versions of 7.4. On another machine
> running Debian Woody with PotgreSQL 7.4.10 we don't have any problems.
> Kernels are 2.4.33 on the Sarge machine, 2.4.28 on the Woody machine. Both
> are SMP kernels.
> Does anyone of you perhaps have some hints what's going wrong here?

Most likely causes in these cases tends to be, bad memory, bad hard
drive, bad cpu, bad RAID / IDE / SCSI controller, loss of power when
writing to IDE drives / RAID controllers with cache with no battery
backup.

I.e. check your hardware.