Re: Rescuing OLD ISAM database tables

On 2/24/2015 2:02 PM, Henry Hartley wrote:
> I have recently had the need to recover some data that was archived in the dark and distant past (2003). Unfortunately, while the files were easily found and restored to disk, they are in ISAM format and cannot be read by MySQL (version 5.1.x on CentOS 6.6). I'm trying to figure out my best approach.
>
> My thought was to install some old version of Linux that still has MySQL pre-4.1 onto some spare machine, copy the files onto that and convert them to MyISAM, then copy them back to my main server, where I assume they should just work.
>
> Any other options that anyone can think of?
>
> Any suggestions as to what version of Linux would be easiest? Looks like Fedora 4 and CentOS 4 already had MySQL 4.1. Fedora 3 has MySQL 3.23.58. I think 3.23 is when MyISAM was introduced. Should that work for this purpose?
>

I think your best bet would be to load Version 3.23. It was the stable version for quite a while and contains the ISAM engine (although you may have to enable it - it's been too long). It's also available for download from several places on the internet. It *should* work on current versions of Linux - at least I'd try it. If not, you can always find older versions out there.

This is one of the problems with backing a database just by copying the files. Using the MySQL backup utilities will create a backup which is much more compatible (although not always, especially between major releases).

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Jerry Stuckle
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