On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Tim Wilson wrote:

> I'm still unable to restart mysqld on my server that crashed. I'm afraid
> that I won't be able to dump the current contents of the database so I can
> reload it. I do have the contents of /var/lib/mysql which appears to be the
> raw mysql tables. Is it possible to copy these files, reinstall the system,
> put those files back, and get a working MySQL system?

Yes, but also take a look at mysqlhotcopy - I know it can take backups 
with the server down.