Some time ago, Jon Lapham <lapham@jandr.org> wrote:
> Today I had a power outage which upon reboot seems to have done
> something to cause Postgresql to not restart properly. This has
> happened to me before:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2006-09/msg00938.php
We finally tracked down the cause of this, and it is indeed a Linux
kernel bug: it's simply returning the wrong error code. There'll be
a workaround in the next set of Postgres releases.
regards, tom lane