The physical server on which my virtual server runs crashed yesterday around 21:00 CEST. Of course, my host was already on it by the time I noticed, but the problem was apparently somewhat complicated, so he couldn’t get the server back up ’till morning.
Now that should have been that, but when the server was up and running again, I found that MySQL was pretty much dead. And I couldn’t fix it right away, had to go to work. So when I got home tonight, I jumped right on it.
Turned out that MySQL had some corrupt files, so I fixed them, but it was still behaving pretty buggy. I couldn’t even get it to check or repair my tables, so I did that with myisamchk. Still no luck. 
Because I was more concerned with getting my site back online than figuring out what the heck was wrong with MySQL, I decided to take the quick ‘n’ dirty approach: I just reinstalled the thing. A little drastic (and Windows’ish, as a friend pointed out 
), I know, but at least it worked and was indeed quick. 
