Loss of data and info from system tables!!

Hi all,

Sorry if you have received this before. I've tried to post the complete
mail, but it is not going through.
Warning this is a long e-mail and is across two posts.
I'm hoping someone out there can help.  If this is not the most
appropriate mailing list, please point me in the direction of one which is.

Recently I noticed that my database was missing a huge amount of data.
Which made me very ill!!
before we get to the problem here's the system info:
Postgres 7.4.2
IBM x345 server
OS 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3'
It's 2-way box with hyper threading enabled based on Intel(R) Xeon(TM)
CPU 2.40GHz processor.
There are total 2G memory.
Using IBM serveraid controller

The most import thing for me is data recovery and data integrity! It
most of my PhD!! :'(
Ok the problem.
On the 27th March I notice that one of my web sites was giving me some
weird errors.  When I looked at the SQL statements generating these
error I found that there were no results from these queries.  When I
selected on the table 'protein_database' I discovered that the database
the web site refers to did not exist!! This was all fine 3 days prior!
After further selects on more tables it became apparent there was data
loss across a large number of tables. Now I feel extremely ill!  It
seemed that data which was added to the database when it was initially
created was lost.  As data which I have recently added was still there.
So I though, do a dump of the database now and may be I can use an old
dump (Dec '04) with the new dump and get close to a complete state.
Well to my surprise pg_dump told me that the database did not exist.  So
I logged in via psql and did 'SELECT * FROM pg_database;' which returned
'another persons database' but not mine.  I then performed  'SELECT *
FROM pg_user;'  and it returned 'postgres' and 'another user' but not
me.  Well that was a surprise, how I'm able to log in if I'm not in the
user table??

The rest of the original post to follow...

Many thanks
Noel

--
PhD student
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Monash University
Clayton
Victoria 3800
Australia
Ph: +61 3 9905 1418
e-mail: noel.faux@med.monash.edu.au
web site: http;//vbc.med.monash.edu.au/~fauxn/