postmaster never finishes starting up, silent to boot

Greetings,

I've gotten myself in a pickle and had a postgresql (8.2) instance
fill its disk completely and shutdown itself down. I've moved the
entire data directory to a new, larger slice however postmaster never
finishes "starting". Despite configuring postgresql.conf for excessive
'verboseness' nothing gets outputted to syslog or the --log specified
file. I have a feeling I'm just not hitting the right search terms,
but shouldn't I be able to simply start a fully copied data directory
without issue? at the very least I'd expect some kind of output to
some kind of log. I have to kill it with a 'pg_ctl stop -D /mnt/data
-m i' -- immediate is the only one that actually kills it; and I get
this in syslog:

Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-1] WARNING: terminating
connection because of crash of another server process
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-2] DETAIL: The postmaster has
commanded this server process to roll back the current transaction and
exit, because another server
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-3] process exited abnormally
and possibly corrupted shared memory.
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-4] HINT: In a moment you
should be able to reconnect to the database and repeat your command.
Mar 17 22:36:49 rtg postgres[1879]: [8-5] CONTEXT: xlog redo zeropage: 16645

there are no other postgres instances running on this machine;
actually there is nothing else but the OS running on this machine.

Appreciate a cluebat hit.

thanks,
aaron.glenn