Where /qmsvol is an iSCSI block device A couple of days ago, my server was rebooted and by the time I got to it my database was deleted, gone, zapped, not there any more.
I looked at my pgstartup.log where I see the following....
postmaster cannot access the server configuration file "/qmsvol/pg_8.1.9/postgresql.conf": Permission denied over 17 times and then following by... The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.UTF-8.
I think the following happend... Since my PGDATA was on an iSCSI device, by the time /etc/rc3.d/S64postgresql was executed, the device below it was not available.....question...why the error says "permission denied" vs "file not found". In the meantime, pg_ctl kept trying and finally concluded that the data directory is blank, and hence this must be a out-of-box case and he is good to initdb the PGDATA and as it called initdb to do the job... the iSCSI volume below it came online and by then the bomb had already been dropped.
Now I need to find some facts to support this... Where else can I look for forensics