Re: URGENT - startup process (PID 29541) was terminated by signal 6

andy rost <Andy.Rost@noaa.gov> writes:
> Our Opteron DB server had a problem with its RAID controller requiring
> an immediate shutdown of our Postgres server (8.1.3 on FreeBSD 6.0
> release number 10). We used kill -QUIT on the postmaster PID.

> 2006-10-06 12:32:40 CDT PANIC:  heap_clean_redo: no block
> ...
> 2006-10-06 12:08:48 CDT PANIC:  right sibling is not next child in
> "winddir_idxu"

Um, were you running with full_page_writes off?  Bad idea in 8.1 :-( ...
especially on hardware that turns out to not be 100% reliable.

I think your only hope of restarting the database is to use
pg_resetxlog.  This is likely to leave you with some database
corruption, in the form of partially applied recent transactions.
I'd recommend a dump and reload, or at least REINDEXing all the
indexes, to forestall problems from that.  While you are at it,
update to 8.1.4.

            regards, tom lane