[thelist] Converting old mySQL database

John.Brooking at sappi.com John.Brooking at sappi.com
Wed Oct 27 13:21:46 CDT 2004


Hi, all,

I did probably a very stoopid thing. To make a long story short, I have a
bunch of *.FRM files from a mySQL database, but not any of the other files.
This was an older version, I don't remember which one, but probably 3.*.
Today I installed 4.0.21 (Windows binary), and am trying to get the database
to recognize these old files. (As you can probably tell, I'm not strong on
mySQL. I installed the prior version two years ago and have since forgotten
most of what I knew about administering it. I know now from the last hour's
reading that I should have used mysqldump, but I didn't.)

I'm pretty sure that the *.FRM files were all there were to save from the
old version; I don't remember seeing any others when I backed those up. I've
also learned from the last hour's reading that the DB engine mySQL uses has
changed several times in the last few versions, so it seems clear that my
old files are from the myIsam or maybe even the ISAM engine. What's less
clear is if I can restore my database from just those files, and if so, how.
I've done some googling, but can't seem to find the right search phrase to
tell me how to do this, so I'm hoping someone here knows. (I have also
posted this on the dev.mysql.com forums.)

I went ahead and created the database using the CREATE DATABASE command,
then copied all the *.FRM files into that directory and stopped and
restarted the server. When I get back in, I can issue the USE command on
that database, but when I tried a SELECT command against one of the tables,
I got "ERROR 1017: Can't find file: 'people.MYI' (errno: 2)". So obviously I
can't use them in their present form. I see in the documentation that I can
specify a TYPE on the CREATE TABLE command, but unfortunately, I don't have
the structure of the tables written down anywhere from which to construct a
CREATE TABLE  statement from scratch.

Can anyone point me in a productive direction?

- John
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