"global/pg_control": Permission denied

Last night,

My desktop (acting as a db-server for my discipline's group) has it power cycled this morning at 4:10 (I am not sure what triggered the power cycle). When the computer restarted itself PostgreSQL failed to start on its own. I attempted to start it manually but encounter the following error. If I need to, I can re-install postgres and restore a dump file that I took last night. But I would like to discover why this happened so that I can hopefully prevent it from reoccurring in the future.

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C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.2\bin>pg_ctl start -D ..\data
server starting

C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.2\bin>2007-11-15 06:36:13 PANIC: could not open control file "global/pg_control": Permission denied

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
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I don't know if this is related, but I also saw an error raised in the windows event viewer by Postgres when postgres attempted to restart itself after the power cycle:

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2007-11-15 06:26:26 FATAL: invalid value for parameter "log_statement_stats": 1
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Also right before the power cycled I saw this warning:

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Windows saved user JEG\BroersR registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp
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Regards, Richard Broersma Jr.