Optimise failed - table now locked?

[notionlogic]

I thought I had posted a message about this just now but I can't see it listed so I guess I screwed it up somehow. Anyway I'm starting to get a little desperate here :-)

I ran an optimize on one of my tables and, although it appeared to work correctly (and found an error), the table now comes up as "in use" in PHPMyAdmin.

I even tried using mysql from the command line (via telnet) but I get this error:

mysql> use xxxxxxxdb;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Didn't find any fields in table 'Pages'
Database changed
mysql> select * from Pages;
ERROR 1016: Can't open file: 'Pages.MYD'. (errno: 144)
mysql>

Any help greatly appreciated

[notionlogic]

Panic over... after an extensive search on the web for anything that might help, I have now managed to completely restore the table without any loss of data!

I can't quite believe it myself ;-)

For anyone else with this problem (and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy), the solution in my case was:

repair table <table name>

According to the information in the MySQL manual (http://www.mysql.com/doc/R/E/REPAIR_TABLE.html):

<quote>
Normally you should never have to run this command, but if disaster strikes you are very likely to get back all your data from a MyISAM table with REPAIR TABLE. If your tables get corrupted a lot you should try to find the reason for this!
<end quote>

Now I'd better leave that table alone before I mess it all up again!

[[deleted]]

giggle

so, now you know why you should never ever run any administration tasks through a web interface such as phpmyadmin 🙂

and why people always tell you to make backups regularly.

and why I dislike mysql so much 🙂