First things first… during my frantic search for answers, IÂ read a statement similar to this:
“Anybody who’s come across this post looking for information on how to restore their databases, don’t worry – your data is probably not lost.”
In hindsight, I would likely have been much more effective if remembered this, therefore I’ve put it at the top of this post.
Background
My problem arose when I recently came around to the idea of reinstalling one of my servers. It was running FreeBSD 5.2 x86 and I wanted to upgrade to 8.2 x64. It was with great hesitance that I ended the 521 day uptime record.