Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist

Question

I am on a server that has afresh install on RHEL 5. I was able to install Apache and PHP just fine., but I am having serious trouble with my MySQL installation. I tried t

Answer 1

If you have a server which used to happily run MySQL, but now gives this error, then an uninstall and re-install of MySQL is overkill.

In my case, the server died and took a few disk blocks with it. This affected a few files, including /var/lib/mysql/mysql/host.frm and /var/lib/mysql/mysql/proc.frm

Luckily, I could copy these from another server, and this got me past that table error.