Frustrated...pg_dump/restore

I performed a pg_dump on a database and created a new schema-only database to copy that data into.

However trying to use psql -f to load the data in, I get a plethora of syntax errors including the dreaded "invalid command \N".

I even tried to pipe the pg_dump results directly into the psql command....

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_dump -U pgsql --data-only db1 | /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql -U pgsql db2

Same results.

Why?

using -d (switching to inserts instead of COPY) seems to work just fine but is so slow as to be unusable.

Is the COPY pg_dump method useful at all in ANY situation?

Do I have to do a pg_dump using a custom archive option and use pg_resore to make this work? (sounds silly to me).

Any help would be appreciated.