So, I had to shutdown my mini pc home server (on NIXOS) so that it could be used for something else. Most of my data is in a pair of external hdds in a RAID configuration. However the Postgres database was in the boot drive. I still have it, but it refuses to boot anywhere else (tried some old spare laptops). How can I recover it?
The database store is in /var/lib/postgres. You can just connect that disk somewhere else and start the database using the same (important!) major release of Postgres. I think the major version number is in the folder name. Then do whatever from there.