Re: Postgres does not want to start

Jason Lee <jason(at)theleehouse(dot)net> writes:
> When I checked my system this morning, I could not connect to any of my databases. After some digging, I found that it was returning this error:
> DEBUG: database system was shut down at 2002-09-14 11:53:40 CDT
> DEBUG: ReadRecord: unexpected pageaddr 0/1564000 in log file 0, segment 1, offset 5783552
> DEBUG: invalid primary checkpoint record
> DEBUG: ReadRecord: unexpected pageaddr 0/1564000 in log file 0, segment 1, offset 5783552
> DEBUG: invalid secondary checkpoint record
> FATAL 2: unable to locate a valid checkpoint record

The page address in the xlog page seems to be 20000 hex less than it
ought to be. This might be a dropped bit, or something worse. Do you
have postmaster log entries from just before this startup failure began
happening? Was there a crash, or was it an intended shutdown? It would
be useful to run contrib/pg_controldata and see what it says.

I think you will need to run pg_resetxlog to get back to a usable state,
but it's important first to try to understand what happened, so that you
know how much damage is likely to have occurred.

regards, tom lane