Re: Odd corruption issue reported on dba.stackexchange.com, need advice

On Thu, 2012-07-19 at 11:35 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> The short version is that the person did a bulk-load of some PostGIS
> data using the osm2pgsql data-loader tool
> ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql) to populate a Pg 9.1
> database. This appeared to succeed, but when the server was restarted
> it failed to come up, complaining that "WAL contains references to
> invalid pages" and "page 1493172 of relation base/16385/477861 was
> uninitialized" (for many different pages).
>
> The logs of the shutdown suggest that a backend probably crashed, but
> that shouldn't cause the WAL and heap corruption observed by the OP.

Is it possible that the machine has write cache enabled?

Regards,
    Jeff Davis