Arun Sirpal tells a harrowing story of a Recovery Pending situation:
Looks like I had open transactions while my transaction log got lost during an outage. I tried switching the database online but that failed.
Msg 5181, Level 16, State 5, Line 4 Could not restart database “FAT”. Reverting to the previous status. Msg 5069, Level 16, State 1, Line 4 ALTER DATABASE statement failed.
Accessing the database is the real challenge now.
Moral of the story: have backups and have good luck.