Re: FATAL error after a system crash

Tom Lane wrote:

Feng-Cheng Chang <breeze@alumni.nctu.edu.tw> writes: 

"FATAL 1: cannot open pg_variable: no such file or directory"
and terminates the connection.   

Well, if that's the only problem, you got (very) lucky.  7.1.* doesn't
actually use pg_variable, but there is still vestigial code in it that
tries to open that file during startup.  All you need is an empty file
of the right name, so try
touch $PGDATA/global/1264

But I fear that'll just let you get to the next problem :-(.  If Windoze
managed to lose that file, it probably managed to lose other stuff too.
If it does seem to start up okay, I'd recommend trying to do pg_dumpall,
and then initdb and reload if the dump process doesn't show errors.

Things went like what you said....
I started postmaster and connected to it using psql without error messages. When I tried to pg_dumpall or pg_dump, the message "cannot open pg_inherits: no such file or directory" appeared. Although I couldn't dump the database, I  use SQL COPY to save all needed tables to files :-D  After the table-by-table recovery, my application was back!

Thank you for your great help :-)

Win2k server
cygwin + postgresql 7.1.3   

This is not a production-grade setup IMHO.  If you don't want to run
a real OS to put Postgres on top of, you'd better be a lot more
religious about backing up.			

I don't think it is a good setup, either. If I had a spare machine, I would like to install a UNIX-like system and move my application to it. Anyway, thank you for your suggestion. I'll never forget to backup periodically :-)

-- 
Feng-Cheng Chang  (張 峰 誠)
Ph.D. Student of
Communication Electronics & Signal Processing Laboratory,
Institute of Electronics, NCTU, Taiwan, R.O.C. 
E-mail: fcchang.ee88g@nctu.edu.tw