Help! Can't repair our POST table (very large)

[Ludachris]

We've had our hosting company working on copying one of our databases over to a new hard drive. However, they came across a problem - the POST table is corrupted and they cannot repair it. It's a large table. They have been using myismchk with no luck. They have apache shut down and still no luck. What should I have them try? Please help ASAP!

Here are the results of a standard check:

warning : Table is marked as crashed and last repair failed
warning : 3302 clients are using or haven't closed the table properly
warning : Size of indexfile is: 670544896 Should be: 56593408
warning : Size of datafile is: 597236416 Should be: 597103180
error : Found 1540891 keys of 1497169
error : Corrupt


Thanks in advance.

[Scott MacVicar]

You need to stop mysql and read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...r-options.html

there is a -e flag that might help, as it says on the page. Only use if you are desperate.

[Steve Machol]

If myisamchk doesn't work then unfortunately this database may not be repairable. Please see this post for alternate methods:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44909/

[Ludachris]

Steve, how does one prevent this from happening? I cannot imagine being told that 5 years of data is just not recoverable.

[Steve Machol]

DB corruption is invariably due to a poorly configured or maintained server, or simply a server glitch. There is not much you can do to prevent this yourself. This is why it's important to make and keep frequent backups.

[Scott MacVicar]

It really does depend on what caused the underlying issue, how were they copying it to another disk? I hope they were using mysqlhotcopy and not a regular copy / move command. MySQL should definately have been stopped at the time if they were not using mysqlhotcopy.

Server hardware fault?

MySQL is pretty fault resistent apart from when its misused, MySQL provide commercial support afaik though I'm not sure if it covers the recovery of databases.