Ok, Ubuntu is the distribution.

mysql is crashing on startup. This is the output from running mysqld_safe:

060715 16:44:01 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 43675
060715 16:44:01 [Note] Recovering after a crash using /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin
060715 16:44:01 [Note] Starting crash recovery...
060715 16:44:01 [Note] Crash recovery finished.
060715 16:44:01 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Incorrect file format 'host'

It was working just fine until a few days ago. I've tried looking for similar problems, but I haven't been able to find anything of use. (Sidenote: oddly, one search on Google told me that the search I tried was too similar to automated spyware searches so wouldn't show me anything...)

I have tried re-installing the packages, but to no avail. (It worked for a broken libmono install.)

Any help would be appreciated.

Patrick

Have you upgraded mysql?

Checkout http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=66

I think the problem was that my xfs filesystem did not recover from a hard lock. The system as a whole began to degrade due to it. Eventually, it necessitated an entire reinstall. For the root partition, its all ext3 now...

An option is to re-setup the mysql table (mysql_install_db) as this has the host table I assume your statup is complaning about, but this would cause you to lose all previous user privlages. Hopefuly your other databases are ok?