hardware failure - data recovery

[Rick Gigger <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To make a long story short lets just say that I had a bit of a  
hardware failure recently.

If I got an error like this when trying to dump a db from the mangled  
data directory is it safe to say it's totally hosed or is there some  
chance of recovery?

pg_dump: ERROR:  could not open relation 1663/18392/18400: No such  
file or directory
pg_dump: SQL command to dump the contents of table "file" failed:  
PQendcopy() failed.
pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR:  could not open relation  
1663/18392/18400: No such file or directory
pg_dump: The command was: COPY public.file (vfs_id, vfs_type,  
vfs_path, vfs_name, vfs_modified, vfs_owner, vfs_data) TO stdout;

Thanks,

Rick