Carol Walter <walterc@indiana.edu> writes:
> Are the files that contain the hex characters supposed to contain a
> single string and no control characters?
Yes, you want 256K occurrences of the byte value 0x55 and nothing else.
> I'm also wondering if, after I create the dummy files, and pg_dump
> works, I could restore an old pg_dumpall file and then insert any
> data that aren't there from the pg_dumps.
It'd be a good idea to do as much cross-checking as you can, since
it's highly probable that the dumped data will be at least partly wrong.
No, I'm afraid updating to 8.2.latest won't get you out of this.
It might possibly prevent a recurrence.
regards, tom lane