Hey all,

I recovered the hard disk from a just-out-of-use server here and I need to get at some data from the MySQL database that was running on it but I only have the files. All the files have the old machines hostname in their name so I'm presuming that means I can't just copy /var/lib/mysql from the disk to my machine and reload MySQL.

I'm after the postfix database, so I copied /var/lib/mysql/postfix to my machine, restarted mysqld and the database exists now, I can't see any tables or data inside it. I Googled and found a few non-free Windows apps that do the job but if there is another way I'm all for it. Both databases were running on MySQL 5.0.22 and both had InnoDB compiled out which makes things a tad simpler I think.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

Seems I was searching the wrong terms. As soon as I tried "recover" instead of "read" I got a good hit. Answer is not just copying /var/lib/mysql/<dbname> but also /var/lib/mysql/mysql