Sometimes, we do something REALLY STUPID, and we end up with a MySQL InnoDB database without its .frm files. Thanks to the innodb-tools project[1] and Chris Calender's helpful howto[2], all is not lost! This is a crude wrapper to let you recover all the tables in one pass, per Chris's "recover based off the entire ibdata files" method, and iterate till you get it right. Documentation is sorely lacking, as is design, but: - Change the obvious globals to match your setup - If you don't find them obvious, you shouldn't use this - table_list should be a simple text file with a list of table names, one per line - the output of "create_defs" is stored in the "defs/" directory, and create_defs is only run once. That way, you can tweak the defs to eliminate garbage records and repeat as needed. - It only recreates the .tsv file if the .defs has been updated. Kinda like make. - I don't even know MySQL. Use at your own risk. - If you're this desperate, you might also like to know about ext3undel[3] and photorec[4]. [1] http://code.google.com/p/innodb-tools/ [2] http://www.chriscalender.com/?tag=innodb-recovery-tool [3] http://projects.izzysoft.de/trac/ext3undel [4] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec