Re: [GENERAL] Still big problems with pg_dump!

-hackers removed.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 10:11:41AM +0200, Wim wrote:

> ERROR:  AllocSetFree: cannot find block containing chunk 4c5ad0

This is definitely some sort of disk problem.  Either you've written
bad data to the disk in some way, or else the disk is corrupted or
damaged.

If it is a hardware problem, the obvious suspects are memory (I'd
discount this idea unless everything else doesn't check out), a disk
failure, or a controller failure.

It could be OS related as well.  Several of the 2.4 Linux kernel
series, for instance, had roblems with massive filesystem corruption.

> Some people suggest a drive failure, but I checked that and found no
> problems...

How did you check?

> I must say that one of the table contains more than 3.000.000 rows,
> another more than 1.400.000...

When is your most recent backup?  If you can't pg_dump, you will be
needing that backup.

> I must say that I had this problem a few months before, I got some help
> then, but that couldn't solve my problem,
> I recreated the database from scratch and copied the data, to fix thing
> quickly. Thing went well for about two months :-(

So you re-installed the data set on a machine that had somehow
failed, you don't know why, and hoped that the problem would
solve itself?  Uh, that wasn't a good idea.  In the future, if you
have a problem which people suggest might be, for instance, a bad
disk, it'd be a _very good_ idea to figure out precisely what the
problem is before relying on the identical hardware again.

A

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