brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

“Invalid Key” error for jos_session, jos_components, and jos_core_acl_aco tables in Joomla database

I ran into this one this evening, and at its root, it comes down to some changes made between MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.

Problem is, fixing the issues created by these changes seems to be more involved than the documentation implies. Suggested fixes such as commenting out the skip-bdb option in my.cnf did not work in this case.

After spending hours perusing support sites, and banging my head repeatedly against these tables that were being reported as "corrupt" and unrepairable, I finally hit upon a low-tech solution.

I downloaded the actual database files from /var/lib/mysql, tucked it into the /var/lib/mysql directory of a MySQL 5.0 install, exported the SQL queries and re-imported them into my 5.1 install.

This solution isn't for everyone, of course, because it requires access to a 5.0 install, but it worked for me.