"David A. Ulevitch" <davidu@everydns.net> writes:
> I did the normal debian binary install of postgresql-server and copies
> everything from the old server's /var/lib/postgres to the new
> /var/lib/postgres. I then copied everything from /etc/postgresql from the
> old server to the new server too. (/etc was also fine in the crash) After
> chown'ing all the files to `chown -R postgres.postgres /var/lib/postgres`
> I tried to login.
Uh, was the new machine's postmaster running while you did all this?
You would certainly want the postmaster down while you overwrite
/var/lib/postgres ...
regards, tom lane