upgrade issue

Our system admin recently upgraded our Linux system from 7.1 to 7.3.
Apparently this upgrade also changed our postgres version from 7.1.3 to
7.2.1-5.

We are now getting the following error:

> An old version of the database format was found.
> You need to upgrade the data format before using PostgreSQL.
> See (Your System's documentation directory)/postgresql-7.2/README.rpm-dist
> for more information.

I have now read (all be it to late) the documentation warning of this
problem. Luckily we do not have any data that I need to save in the
database. I could easily get back to a functioning state if I could drop the
database and rebuild it via my schema.sql file. However, I cannot drop the
database unless I can get the postmaster started.
Can anyone advise?

Also, the upgrade doc that I am reading makes mention of a postgres-dump
command but there is no documentation on the system referencing this
command. Can someone please tell me more about it? Is it a new command?

Thanks so much for your assistance.
Jodi