mySQL question

[Dirks]

So I found an old database dump from my forum prior to a crash we had back in 2006.

I thought it would be a neat idea to go through and let other folks see their old posts, but the backup .sql file itself appears corrupted. By compressing the file and decompressing it, I was able to get about 10% of the table information from the file (I check by opening it in Wordpad). Do any of you guys know about any programs I can use to get the rest of the non-corrupted table information out of this file?

Any help is much appreciated.

[nerbert]

phpMyAdmin > Operations > Table Maintenance > Repair Table

Might help. See what happens.

[snakes1100]

When importing a SQL file, if its actually corrupted & repairable, MySQL will fix it automatically itself when you import it, phpmyadmin is useless at this point if you cant import it, so you cant use it to repair a table of a db that dont yet exist.

[WEBDosser]

how big is file?

[Dirks]

I managed to recover the file using old school methods, but it appears the database dump was incomplete. It got through maybe half the posts on the original save. Since there are no user tables, the database doesn't know what to do. I just get the database error message, even when I start a new vB upload (for the tables) then import the old database in. Quite depressing really.

If anyone has a fix at this point, it's appreciated, but I'm not holding my breath. Thanks everyone for your input.

[tbworld]

If the database is not truncated, then you have to narrow it down to what table is in error. (It can be other things too, but start here.) Once you find the table, post the name of the table and re-ask the question. Basically you have to syntactically parse the table. If the corruption spans multiple tables it gets logarithmically more difficult.

There are companies out there that try to restore databases, if this is really above your head. Do not expect 100% complete restoration. You cannot restore data when you do not know what the original data was suppose to be. Guesses have to be made, based on the model.

[Dirks]

Yeah, it would be too much guessing. It basically got through the "P" tables. I can probably guess users based on the posts, but threads would be nigh impossible, I'm afraid.

Thanks for your help.