Disclaimer: as this should be a standard operation, i feel something on my side must have gone terribly wrong.
I am trying to use postgresql on windows 71. The installer from edb works fine, apart from an apparently more than eight years old issue, where locale names don't match (my gut tells me windows is reporting inconsistent stuff, like it often does). When i select English, United Kingdom as locale, it fails, and goes to English_United States.1252.
As this is unchangeable after the database cluster creation, i therefore delete it, and attempt to recreate it in the same folder, fixing the locale name problem:
initdb --locale="English_United Kingdom" --lc-monetary="English_United States" -E UTF8 -U postgres -W -A scram-sha-256 -D "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\13\data"
Now initdb feels like security without an escape hatch is a good thing, drops priviledges it starts with, and then obviously fails to write anywhere in C:\Program Files, even when originally started as administrator.
creating directory C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/13/data ... initdb: error: could not create directory "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/13/data": Permission denied
How can i reproduce, what the installer would have done, just with the proper locale? I noticed i can create the data folder, and grant full permissions to every user, then initdb works, but the resulting permissions don't look like what the installer produces at all (e.g. regarding the services user NETWORK SERVICE).
Edit: the installer executes getlocales.exe when started, so injecting a different file is difficult. The INITDBOPTS environment variable has lower priority than the installer settings, so it's not useful here.
1: yeah windows 7 is EOL i know..., but postgresql is like 30 years old, so this really shouldn't matter.
initdbis not being elevated despite being started in an elevated command prompt. I assume you are running a supported version of postgresql? (I could careless you using Windows 7, provided postgresql supports it, or you are running a version of postgresql that supports it).getlocales.exe, which just puts "English_United Kingdom" to stdout, and replace the original mid-install. There appears to be an environment variableINITDBOPTS, but the values from the installer supersede it, making it half-useless.