Hello Everyone, I've got a bit of a problem. It started last night when postgres (8.1.9) went down citing the need for a vacuum full to be done due to the transaction log needing to wraparound. So I stopped the server, logged in using a standalone backend and started a vacuum full analyze on all dbs (one being 156GB). During the vacuum of the larger of the databases a few hours in it failed, it's filled up the 18GB pg_xlog partition with over 1000 wal files. Due to running out of space the vacuum failed. When I came in this morning I attempted to start postgres using the normal init script, and now it's stuck. The startup process is thrashing the disks and working hard, pg_controldata says it's in recovery, but it's been going for over two hours. My question is where I should go from here? Should i kill the startup script, clear out the excess wal files, start the standalone server and try vacuum again? Or should I just wait and see if the startup process sorts itself out? The startup process is responding to login attempts with FATAL: the database system is starting up and logging these attempts so I assume it's still alive and working... I appreciate any help and advice, I really hope it's not going to turn into lost data (gulp). Output from pg_controldata: pg_control version number: 812 Catalog version number: 200510211 Database system identifier: 5142157718116482999 Database cluster state: in recovery pg_control last modified: Wed 10 Dec 2008 05:55:52 PM CST Current log file ID: 811 Next log file segment: 221 Latest checkpoint location: 327/8AE2BED0 Prior checkpoint location: 327/8AE2BE80 Latest checkpoint's REDO location: 327/8AE2BED0 Latest checkpoint's UNDO location: 0/0 Latest checkpoint's TimeLineID: 1 Latest checkpoint's NextXID: 2146484231 Latest checkpoint's NextOID: 123620 Latest checkpoint's NextMultiXactId: 806872 Latest checkpoint's NextMultiOffset: 1766404 Time of latest checkpoint: Wed 10 Dec 2008 06:01:01 AM CST Maximum data alignment: 8 Database block size: 8192 Blocks per segment of large relation: 131072 Bytes per WAL segment: 16777216 Maximum length of identifiers: 64 Maximum columns in an index: 32 Date/time type storage: floating-point numbers Maximum length of locale name: 128 LC_COLLATE: en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE: en_US.UTF-8 -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general