Postgresql 9.2 won't start after rerunning installer All,

I made a fatal mistake and accidentally ran the core installer for postgresql rather than the stackinstaller. I didn't go all the way through the install process but it still set something that is preventing it from starting at all now. This is a production DB and I really need some insight in to what I can do to troubleshoot this problem.

I am running 9.2 on a Windows 2008R2 server.
Sorry, I don't have enough rep to participate in the comments yet, but I use PostgreSQL a lot on Linux and Windows.

I ran into this same problem the other day. I ran the 9.1.7 installer and it broke my clusters. As Mike Christensen said, the key is running pg_ctl START in a command window to get a useful error message.

I got the command to use from the Services panel. When you view properties on your cluster definition, you'll see the pg_ctl command to start the service. Copy that command and paste it into the command window, then change the "runservice" parameter to "start", and use runas.exe to launch the command as the postgres user (9.1 and below) or LOCALSERVICE account (later versions). 

It should already contain the path to your cluster data directory. This is what mine looks like:

C:/PROGRA~1/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin/pg_ctl.exe runservice -N "PostgreSQL Dev Cluster" -D "C:/PROGRA~1/PostgreSQL/9.1/data"


Check the error message you get from that command, and check the database logs also.

In my case I had two problems. First, I couldn't get the installer to work until I ran it under postgres local admin account. But when I did that, my domain account no longer had privileges. I had to re-grant myself full control on PostgreSQL directory tree. ( Edit CR: Don't mess with permissions on the PostgreSQL data directory unless you know exactly what you are doing, you are likely to make any problem much worse not better.)

Then I tried starting it again and got a different message indicating port 5432 was already in use. This turned out to be true. Somehow the installer had left an orphaned postgres.exe process open on port 5432, even though the Services panel showed that service as not started.

I had to use netstat -ano to find the PID and kill the orphan from task manager. Then everything started normally.

Hope that helps.

Brian