"Server doesn't listen" in pgAdmin III with postgreSQL

Question

First of all : I'm a novice in what touches to databases.

I'm using postgreSQL with pgAdmin III, and it worked perfectly fine until some days ago : Some days ago, when I was not working on it, I saw in the "background process" of Windows that several identical postgreSQL programs (?) were running, and I decided to stop them, because I was not using them at the time. Mistake : Now, when I try to connect to the server (on localhost), I receive the error message :

"Server doesn't listen"

The server doesn't accept connections: the connection library reports could not connect to server: Connection refused (0x0000274D/10061) Is the server running on host "localhost" (::1) and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432? could not connect to server: Connection refused (0x0000274D/10061) Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

I already took a look on similar topics on stackoverflow, looked the listen_address file, the postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf files, but everything seems to be "normal" (according to what I read in these topics).

I posted this because... well, I didn't find any other person that did what I did (stopping the background process, and then not being able to reconnect).

Answer 1

Use Services (Start → Run → services.msc) and look for the postgresql-[version] service. Is it running?

• If not, try to start it.
  • If that works, you can make it startup automatically by changing the Startup Type with Windows to Automatic; or perhaps Automatic, delayed start if you don't want it to slow down startup too much.
• If you can't start it, you may have just installed pgAdmin and not installed PostgreSQL itself.
• If it won't start open the Event Viewer (Start → Run → Eventvwr) and look for error messages relating to the PostgreSQL service.