postgreSQL zero_damaged_pages 参数

There is a special option: zero_damaged_pages=on that you can use on postgresql.conf, it is documented here.

This option will allow for a pg_dump (or pg_dump_all) that do not stop on critical errors and get as much data back as possible, but you will loose the data that cannot be read.:

(exceprt from documentation, I added the strong.

Detection of a damaged page header normally causes PostgreSQL to report an error, aborting the current transaction. Setting zero_damaged_pages to on causes the system to instead report a warning, zero out the damaged page in memory, and continue processing. This behavior will destroy data, namely all the rows on the damaged page. However, it does allow you to get past the error and retrieve rows from any undamaged pages that might be present in the table. It is useful for recovering data if corruption has occurred due to a hardware or software error. You should generally not set this on until you have given up hope of recovering data from the damaged pages of a table. Zeroed-out pages are not forced to disk so it is recommended to recreate the table or the index before turning this parameter off again. The default setting is off, and it can only be changed by a superuser.

zero_damaged_pages 参数主要作用是 让pg_dump 等程序不要直接报错退出

    /*
     * We get here only in the corner case where we are trying to extend
     * the relation but we found a pre-existing buffer marked BM_VALID.
     * This can happen because mdread doesn't complain about reads beyond
     * EOF (when zero_damaged_pages is ON) and so a previous attempt to
     * read a block beyond EOF could have left a "valid" zero-filled
     * buffer.  Unfortunately, we have also seen this case occurring
     * because of buggy Linux kernels that sometimes return an
     * lseek(SEEK_END) result that doesn't account for a recent write. In
     * that situation, the pre-existing buffer would contain valid data
     * that we don't want to overwrite.  Since the legitimate case should
     * always have left a zero-filled buffer, complain if not PageIsNew.
     */
	  
        /* check for garbage data */
        if (!PageIsVerified((Page) bufBlock, blockNum))
        {
            if (mode == RBM_ZERO_ON_ERROR || zero_damaged_pages)
            {
                ereport(WARNING,
                        (errcode(ERRCODE_DATA_CORRUPTED),
                         errmsg("invalid page in block %u of relation %s; zeroing out page",
                                blockNum,
                                relpath(smgr->smgr_rnode, forkNum))));
                MemSet((char *) bufBlock, 0, BLCKSZ);
            }
            else
                ereport(ERROR,
                        (errcode(ERRCODE_DATA_CORRUPTED),
                         errmsg("invalid page in block %u of relation %s",
                                blockNum,
                                relpath(smgr->smgr_rnode, forkNum))));
        }
    }
}