Weird and damaging SQL event - my vb_post table just randomly emptied!

[moonclamp]

Earlier on my site was running very strangely - I kept getting the following SQL error on the forum index and a couple of other pages:

Originally Posted by my warning emails

MySQL Error : Got error 12 from storage engine Error Number : 1030
Date : Monday, August 13th 2007 @ 08:03:00 PM

Not being too sure what it was I decided to repair/optimise the tables. There was another db outage in the middle of the optimisation. There were a few like this, a couple of them actually killed phpMyadmin for a while.

When the site eventually came back to life, none of my threads had any posts - I checked the vb_post table and it was empty

"MySQL returned an empty result set (i.e. zero rows). (Query took 0.0002 sec)"

Can anyone shed any light on what happened? Are all 287000+ posts just gone in the twinkling of an eye? Or are they just moved to somewhere my forum can't find them?

Can they be retrieved?