> Jim Cochrane <jtc@dim.com> writes:
> >> How old? We need to know the exact PG version number.
>
> > cat PG_VERSION
> > 7.2
>
> That's not exact, it only tells the major release number.
> "postmaster --version" was what I was looking for.
It outputs:
postmaster (PostgreSQL) 7.2.1
>
> > However the server failed to start up, giving the following error messages:
>
> > postmaster successfully started
> > DEBUG: database system was shut down at 2003-12-07 14:55:22 MST
> > DEBUG: open of /home/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000000000000000 (log file 0, segm
ent 0) failed: No such file or directory
> > DEBUG: invalid primary checkpoint record
> > DEBUG: open of /home/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/0000000000000000 (log file 0, segm
ent 0) failed: No such file or directory
> > DEBUG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
> > FATAL 2: unable to locate a valid checkpoint record
> > DEBUG: startup process (pid 31411) exited with exit code 2
> > DEBUG: aborting startup due to startup process failure
>
> This is ungood :-(. Your only hope at this point is to run pg_resetxlog
> (which is not a standard part of the 7.2 distribution, but is available
> as a contrib utility). If you are lucky, that will let you into the
> database, but you should be aware of the possibility that you've lost
> parts of the last few transactions and therefore have a
> not-completely-consistent database.
I guess I'm unlucky. I shut the server down and ran pg_resetxlog, which
gave the error message:
The database was not shut down cleanly.
Resetting the xlog may cause data to be lost!
If you want to proceed anyway, use -f to force reset.
So I used the -f option and started the server up, which started successfully:
postmaster successfully started
DEBUG: database system was shut down at 2003-12-10 12:31:46 MST
DEBUG: checkpoint record is at 0/2000010
DEBUG: redo record is at 0/2000010; undo record is at 0/2000010; shutdown TRUE
DEBUG: next transaction id: 158; next oid: 16556
DEBUG: database system is ready
However, the same problem occurs as before - When I use psql to connect to
a database and then use \d to list the tables, there are not tables:
No relations found.
It appears to me that the metadata for the database tables got corrupted or
blown away. It looks like it's time to give up.
In case anyone's concerned, this data was important, but not critical - It
hurts to loose it, but I'm not going to end up in jail because of it :-)
Anyway, I appreciate you guys' help. I've learned some new things about
postgres.
Jim Cochrane