All,
We recently had a server crash at my company which contained a program to monitor various network devices around the world. Of course the server was sitting in a dusty closet somewhere and the owner is long gone from the company, so we can't find where any backups were stored. At any rate, starting up the server reveals a completely locked down setup with no OS access. The only way to access the machine is over the network. Now, any access attempt over the network causes the machine to lock up/freeze. Trying to move the HDD to another machine only led us to the conclusion (later confirmed by the vendor) that the appliance is hardware-locked.
The vendor won't give us any way to access the machine and retrieve the DB, so I removed the HDD and connected it to my Linux laptop. I was able to grab all the DB files and copy them to my Windows desktop, where I then installed PostgreSQL 9.0 (to match the version that was on the server) with pgAdmin III. I changed the default directory to the folder containing the DB files using this tutorial: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Change_the_default_PGDATA_directory_on_Windows
...but when I try to start the DB after this, pgAdmin hangs for a few seconds, then gives the message "Starting Service....Done", but the server doesn't actually start and I can't access the DB. At this point, I'm guessing there may be some incompatibility between the default PostgreSQL implementation and whatever the vendor did when putting together their product. That being said, is there any way to resurrect a DB from its component files?
Thanks,
Alka Gupta
