How do you fix a MySQL “Incorrect key file” error when you can't repair the table?

Question

I\'m trying to run a rather large query that is supposed to run nightly to populate a table. I\'m getting an error saying Incorrect key file for table \'/var/tmp/#sql

Answer 1

In my case, there was a disc space issue. I deleted some unwanted war files from my server and it worked after that.

Answer 2

This happenes might be because you ran out of disk storage and the mysql files and starting files got corrupted

The solution to be tried as below

First we will move the tmp file to somewhere with larger space

Step 1: Copy your existing /etc/my.cnf file to make a backup

cp /etc/my.cnf{,.back-`date +%Y%m%d`}

Step 2: Create your new directory, and set the correct permissions

mkdir /home/mysqltmpdir
chmod 1777 /home/mysqltmpdir

Step 3: Open your /etc/my.cnf file

nano /etc/my.cnf

Step 4: Add below line under the [mysqld] section and save the file

tmpdir=/home/mysqltmpdir

Secondly you need to remove or error files and logs from the /var/lib/mysql/ib_* that means to remove anything that starts by "ib"

rm /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1 and rm /var/lib/mysql/ibda.... and so on

Thirdly you will need to make sure that there is a pid file available to have the database to write in

Step 1 you need to edit /etc/my.cnf

pid-file= /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid 

Step 2 create the directory with the file to point to

 mkdir /var/run/mysqld
 touch /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid
 chown -R mysql:mysql /var/run/mysqld

Last step restart mysql server

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Answer 3

Apply proper charset and collation to database, table and columns/fields.

I creates database and table structure using sql queries from one server to another. it creates database structure as follows:

1. database with charset of "utf8", collation of "utf8_general_ci"
2. tables with charset of "utf8" and collation of "utf8_bin".
3. table columns / fields have charset "utf8" and collation of "utf8_bin".

I change collation of table and column to utf8_general_ci, and it resolves the error.

Answer 4

You must change the location of MySQL's temporary folder which is '/tmp' in most cases to a location with a bigger disk space. Change it in MySQL's config file.

Basically your server is running out of disk space where /tmp is located.