Hi,

I’ve recently encountered an issue running Postgres (both 8.4 and 9.1) on a VMware VM running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as the guest OS with the data directory running out of a VMware shared folder. Previously on 8.4 this had worked out for me but after upgrading VMware and re-building my VM I’ve started to encounter this issue. It seems like the problem occurs when I run initdb, I get the following error:

# sudo -u postgres /usr/lib/postgresql/9.1/bin/initdb --noclean -D /mnt/pg_data/
Running in noclean mode. Mistakes will not be cleaned up.
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.UTF-8.
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UTF8.
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

fixing permissions on existing directory /mnt/pg_data ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 100
selecting default shared_buffers ... 32MB
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /mnt/pg_data/base/1 ... FATAL: could not open file "pg_xlog/000000010000000000000001" (log file 0, segment 1): No such file or directory

child process exited with exit code 1
initdb: data directory "/mnt/pg_data" not removed at user's request

Here is a snippet of an strace around where the error occurs:

write(4, "insert OID = 767 ( lo_import 11 "..., 141) = 141
write(4, "insert OID = 765 ( lo_export 11 "..., 132) = 132
write(4, "insert OID = 766 ( int4inc 11 10"..., 125) = 125
write(4, "insert OID = 768 ( int4larger 11"..., 134) = 134
write(4, "insert OID = 769 ( int4smaller 1"..., 136) = 136
write(4, "insert OID = 770 ( int2larger 11"..., 134) = 134
write(4, "insert OID = 771 ( int2smaller 1"..., 136) = 136
write(4, "insert OID = 774 ( gistgettuple "..., 142) = 142
write(4, "insert OID = 638 ( gistgetbitmap"..., 144) = 144
write(4, "insert OID = 775 ( gistinsert 11"..., 158) = 158
write(4, "insert OID = 777 ( gistbeginscan"..., 151) = 151
write(4, "insert OID = 778 ( gistrescan 11"..., 155) = 155
write(4, "insert OID = 779 ( gistendscan 1"..., 137) = 137
write(4, "insert OID = 780 ( gistmarkpos 1"..., 137) = 137
write(4, "insert OID = 781 ( gistrestrpos "..., 139) = 139
write(4, "insert OID = 782 ( gistbuild 11 "..., 143) = 143
write(4, "insert OID = 326 ( gistbuildempt"..., 143) = 143
write(4, "insert OID = 776 ( gistbulkdelet"..., 158) = 158
write(4, "insert OID = 2561 ( gistvacuumcl"..., 155) = 155
write(4, "insert OID = 772 ( gistcostestim"..., 187) = 187
write(4, "insert OID = 2787 ( gistoptions "..., 139) = 139
write(4, "insert OID = 784 ( tintervaleq 1"..., 138) = 138
write(4, "insert OID = 785 ( tintervalne 1"..., 138) = 138
write(4, "insert OID = 786 ( tintervallt 1"..., 138) = 138
write(4, "insert OID = 787 ( tintervalgt 1"..., 138) = 138
write(4, "insert OID = 788 ( tintervalle 1"..., 138FATAL: could not open file "pg_xlog/000000010000000000000001" (log file 0, segment 1): No such file or directory
) = -1 EPIPE (Broken pipe)

I probably should be posting to the VMware mailing list with this question but I wanted to see if anyone had any insight or suggestions here. I’ve seen many similar issues but none of the solutions proposed there worked for me.

Thanks for any help,

Cesar