replay WAL segments without a "base backup" ?

Hi all;

due to operator error at one of my client sites we're trying to restore a
deleted db.

We did a restore with a pgdump that went fine but the dump is 3weeks old. they
do have WAL segments and they claim that the WAL segments are exactly in line
with the needed transactions - from a timing perspective.  However no base
backup with pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() was ever run.


Is there any way to trick postgres into thinking that it needs to play fwd
these WAL's?  Would it work to simply place them in a dir, create a
recovery.conf file pointing to that dir and restart the cluster?


Thanks in advance...