Giovanni Gualdi wrote: > of course, I did take care of postmaster.pid file, removing it when > necessary... > thanks > Giovanni <snip> > is there any way, > any utility, to recover the data of a postgres DB just starting from > the file system? I did find a utility which does exactly what you want.... Except that it appears that it was abandoned in 2003 and only supports up to 7.3. It gave me errors when I tried to run it on a 7.4 database. The utility was called pgfsck and it was written in Perl, so it should be moderately portable. Someone who understood the new file structure could probably bring it back to life... I managed to solve my problem without loss of data, by dumb luck more than anything else. Good luck!