Last weekend my problem with disk space exhaustion resurfaced, and seemed to upset MySQL, as I get the following warning when I log into Drupal:

user warning: Table ‘./drupal/watchdog’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1, ‘user’, ‘Session opened for root.’, 0, ”, ‘http://apocryph.org/?q=user/login’, ‘http://apocryph.org/?q=user/login’, ‘65.89.8.127’, 1153755477) in /usr/local/www/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 120.

I’ve not seen this message before, and don’t know how to repair. Perhaps the MySQL docs…

I found a decent article on repairing MySQL tables; it’s pretty straightforward:

bonzo# mysql -u www -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 38 to server version: 5.0.9-beta

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use drupal;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed
mysql> check table watchdog;
+-----------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Table           | Op    | Msg_type | Msg_text                                                              |
+-----------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| drupal.watchdog | check | error    | Table './drupal/watchdog' is marked as crashed and should be repaired |
+-----------------+-------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> repair table watchdog;
+-----------------+--------+----------+----------+
| Table           | Op     | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+-----------------+--------+----------+----------+
| drupal.watchdog | repair | status   | OK       |
+-----------------+--------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (1.09 sec)

mysql> \q
Bye

That was easy…