drop view seems to have made database unusable . . help!

Help!

I attempted to create a view like

create view pscscan as select * from psc, scandat where . . .;

which failed with a message about duplicate entries. I tried
another with

create view pscscan2 as select j_m, j_pts_noise from psc, scandat where . . .;

which worked.

I then tried to drop them both and the backend crashed
I tried to vacuum and the vacuum crashed. Now I can not
connect to the database at all (I deleted the lock file)
Now, postgres seems to create an empty file
"pg_internal.init" and crash when I try to connect.

What happened? Is there any way to save this? I have nearly
100GB in this database . . . sigh.

--Martin

===========================================================================

Martin Weinberg Phone: (413) 545-3821
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy FAX: (413) 545-2117/0648
530 Graduate Research Tower
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003-4525