Re: hard shut down of system

"surabhi.ahuja" <surabhi(dot)ahuja(at)iiitb(dot)ac(dot)in> writes:
> if postmaster is running and i do,
> kill -9 -1
> i.e. i did abrupt shut down

> i am not able to start postmaster

What happens exactly when you try --- what error messages does it print?
What method are you using to try to start the postmaster (pg_ctl,
some init script (whose), etc)?

The reasons I know about for failure to restart in this situation
include
* you forgot to kill all the postmaster child processes too;
* you didn't remove the shared memory segment and/or semaphores,
and the system's SysV limits are too small to let a new postmaster
create a whole duplicate set.
None of these things have anything to do with what happens in a real
system crash.

regards, tom lane