Re: Service not starting: Error 1053

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Frank Featherlight
<dirtydude(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hey Robert,
>
> thanks for replying,
> the package you are referring to I already used (pgInstaller → Top → binary
> → v8.3.6 → win32 → postgresql-8.3.6-2.zip)
> or do you mean the One click installer?

Oh, OK. I had gotten the impression from your email that you were
using an installer from somewhere else.

I don't really know anything about PostgreSQL on Windows, so I'm
afraid I can't give you too much help. My gut feeling from years of
experience with debugging random weird problems on various platforms
is that we need to know more about why this is happening to you and
not to other people. There's obviously something different about your
system than about the systems of other people who are not having this
problem. At a guess, it's some piece of software that you either have
installed or installed and uninstalled but it's not quite gone, or
else it's some Windows update that you have that other people don't,
or maybe some combination of the two.

If you can, I'd try nuking one of the boxes and reinstalling the OS
from scratch. Then, before you do anything else, try installing
PostgreSQL. If that works, then install everything else again a
little at a time and see if you can break it. If you can't, have a
party. If you can, then do it over again and see if you can isolate a
repeatable step that breaks it. If you can't afford to blow away one
of the boxes, then find some old crappy box and see if you can
replicate the problem on there. That's not quite as good because the
hardware isn't the same, but maybe that doesn't happen to be relevant.
Then come back and tell us what you found out so we can pass it on to
the next person who has this problem, or maybe try to fix it...

If you can't get it to install even on a 100% brand-new OS install,
then one has to be suspicious that your hardware configuration is
somehow implicated. That would be pretty interesting, although it
seems somewhat unlikely. In that case you'd want to find a box with
different hardware where it works, and try to swap components around
or otherwise figure out which particular driver is burning you.
You'll probably need to do a fresh OS install on each pass,
unfortunately. I don't really trust Windows uninstall utilities.

> the Windows version I use is Windows XP with SP3 as mentioned in the
> original thread.

Oh, right, sorry. :-(

...Robert