hard disk crash: try to recover the wiki. (Mediawiki 1.9.3 mysql) - MediaWiki-l

13 Sep 2010

Hello

This is a real nightmare. A Mac crashed, the hard disk could
be saved. Right now it can't be booted. That hard disk contained
the wiki of our department.

I don't know precisely the version of the OS (most likely Mac X
10.4), nor the version of mysql (most likely 5.3.x) and to make
things worse I did not generate a dump of the mysql data base.
I have however "access" to the database in the sense that I have 
a copy of the files /var/lib/mysql/maqwiki
(maqwiki is the name of the database)

I followed the advice offered in the mysql mailing list
namely 

[+]
...
  service mysql stop
 cd /var/lib/mysql
 rm -rf *
 tar zxvf maqwiki.tar
 rm -rf ib_logfile*
 chown -R mysql.mysql
 service mysql start 
However after having installed the mediawiki software (I
stick for the moment to 1.9.3) and trying to connect to the
database I only see empty pages. 

    - Could  it be that the  database  was damaged when the  hard
      disk crashed?
       As a matter of fact when I have a look into the
       /var/lib/mysql/maqwiki
       directory most of the  files are very small in size with the
       exception of searchindex.MYD and searchindex.MYI. I
       have no idea whether this is "normal".

    -  I did not do the recover process correctly. Is there
       any "hardcore" mysql command I could use to check the
       database?

    -  the connection between the mediawiki conf and the
       data base is broken. How can I check?

Any help is very much appreciated.

Uwe Brauer 