[Mediawiki-l] borked DB after importImages.php?

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hi everyone,
sorry for the weird title of my post, let me quickly describe the
problem and (what I assume is) its genesis.

About two weeks ago I used importImages.php again to upload a batch of
Images to my wiki, not realizing that I'd run out of disc-space (yeah,
stupid me). So the script stalled in the middle of the process and I
had to kill it with Ctrl-C. After I had figured out the problem,
I removed a few files to free up some disc-space and thought everything
would be fine again.

But then the oddities started, sometimes pictures that I uploaded (no
matter whether via imageImport or one by one with the normal
web-uploader) started to randomely disappear and re-appear.
Unfortunately these problems prevailed, so I decided to look into the
problem a bit.
So up to now I tried:
 * repairing the searchindex-table
 * clearing the cache (unsuccessful because my wiki doesn't have
   caching enabled)
 * changed the LocalSettings file to make the disappearing pics go away
   for good
 * used deleteBatch and deleteArchivedFiles to get rid of the images
 * backed up database, deleted it and re-created it
 * re-installed MediaWiki

Btw, the version I'm using is 1.17. Unfortunately the wiki isn't public
(and since I'm using it for shared research results I can't make it),
so I can't just directly point you to it.

The strange thing is, e.g. looking at Special:NewFiles, the thumbnails
and Image-Info are sometimes there, but doing Refresh in the browser
makes them alternatingly go away and re-appear. (I tried with both
Firefox and Chromium.) When looking at file-links it's the same,
sometimes they're red, then they're blue.

So all in all I'm kinda assuming that this is a database-issue, but i
have no clue how to "reset" the database without having to restore my
content by hand (which I'd really rather not do, because it's a lot of
work).

I'm really stuck here and don't know much else to do, but if any of you
have ideas for debugging or even better: solving this issue, I would be
most greatful!

All the best
Simon Steinbeiß