"Andrew M. Danneffel" <adanneffel@atomation.ca> writes:
> The server is a
> cobalt RaQ4 running Red Hat Linux.
A version number for Postgres would be the useful tidbit here.
> 020111.16:00:01.144 [7651] FATAL 2: Control file context is broken
This error indicates that one of three fields in pg_control has a bogus
value. The only failures hereabouts that we've heard reported from the
field involve a silly timestamp. Is it possible that the system clock
was set to a silly value (ie, < 1970) last time you shut down? If so,
you could recover by commenting out the relevant check in
src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c.
regards, tom lane