UPDATE 5-26-25: This same thing happened again with a completely new database.
I have a SQL server (hosted through XAMPP) using phpMyAdmin. It has worked fine for months, but today I tried to start mySql through the XAMPP control panel and it gave a long series of errors. I tried the top answer (with over 2000 votes) here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18022809/how-can-i-solve-error-mysql-shutdown-unexpectedly/61859561#61859561, and it worked. Unfortunately, now I cannot access my database tables. I don't know if that is because of something I did to fix the MySQL shutdown error or if it is from the same root problem that caused that error in the first place. The error shown is "#1932 - Table 'dbname.tablename' doesn't exist in engine." Now, I know there's a lot of stuff out there about how to fix this. None of it worked for me.
I tried almost all the solutions here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38759870/xampp-mysql-table-doesnt-exist-in-engine-1932, and none of them worked. Most of them centered around moving the ibdata1 file (normally in C:\xampp\mysql\data) from a backup (C:\xampp\mysql\backup) to the actual data folder. Since that seemed to work for most people but not for me, I briefly checked out the ibdata1 file to see if it was a permissions issue (as suggested somewhere). Unfortunately, it appears to have become corrupted. Over the course of trying to fix my issues I basically created two other backups in addition to the provided backup folder, thus four ibdata1 files. All of them look quite strange. Two of them contain some intelligible contents (lots of database-related words along with strange characters and symbols) but also have huge blocks of nothing but the character ΓΏ repeated over and over. The other two have nothing intelligible at all (at least in English) but contain a lot of Chinese characters interspersed with an assortment of strange symbols. The weird part was that apparently the Chinese was actually intelligible; I put some of it into Google Translate and it produced valid sentences about China in the 1980s and 90s, the Beijing Olympics, and other things. The Chinese text would repeat certain phrases and sentences over and over like it was generated by bad AI or something. Freaky weird stuff that I have no idea how it got into my database.
It just makes me wonder what on earth is going on and if I should be concerned about more than just my db.
So, basically, can the ibdata1 file be "uncorrupted?" Can it be generated again from existing information? Do I have to completely redo the database? Reinstall XAMPP?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
