postgres installation error post-bootstrap FATAL: invalid byte sequence - postgresql

Question

I'm trying to install Postgres 13 (Windows version), but I always obtain same error (part is in Spanish):
realizando inicializaci¢n post-bootstrap ... 2021-04-30 12:10:54.935 CEST [1224] FATAL: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xbf
el proceso hijo termin¢ con c¢digo de salida 1
initdb: eliminando el contenido del directorio ®C:/PostgreSQL13/data¯
Called Die(Failed to initialise the database cluster with initdb)...
Failed to initialise the database cluster with initdb
Script stderr:
Program ended with an error exit code
Error al ejecutar C:\WINDOWS\System32\cscript //NoLogo "C:\PostgreSQL13/installer/server/initcluster.vbs" "NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService" "postgres" "****" "C:\Users\user1\AppData\Local\Temp/postgresql_installer_b86f3c1062" "C:\PostgreSQL13" "C:\PostgreSQL13\data" 5432 "English,UnitedStates" 0 : Program ended with an error exit code
Problema al ejecutar el paso post instalación. La instalación no pudo finalizar correctamente
La inicialización del clúster de la base de datos falló.
User user1 has administrator rights. I have also tried to install version 12 instead of 13, but the result is the same.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This is very likely because the database superuser name contains non-ASCII characters.
I don't know exactly how you install PostgreSQL, but this probably happens when you run initdb to create a data directory (which would fit with the "initcluster" script in your message).
If you don't specify a superuser name by using the -U option of initdb (it is customary to use the nae postgres), initdb will name the superuser like your current operating system user. If you are on Windows, that name will be encoded in a Windows encoding like Windows-1252. Now the database doesn't know that, and when it creates the database user, it uses the very bytes of that user name. If that is not correctly encoded UTF-8 (which is won't be if it contains non-ASCII characters), that causes this error.
My suggestion is that you log on to Windows with an operating system user that has all ASCII characters in its name and try again.