Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB | MySQL Ubuntu

Question

I recently upgraded from the previous LTS Ubuntu to Precise and now mysql refuses to start. It complains of the following when I attempt to start it:

╰$ sudo service mysql restart
stop: Unknown instance:
start: Job failed to start

And this shows in "/var/log/mysql/error.log":

120415 23:01:09 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' is disabled.
120415 23:01:09 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
120415 23:01:09 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
120415 23:01:09 [ERROR] Aborting

120415 23:01:09 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete

I've checked permissions on all the mysql directories to make sure it had ownership and I also renamed the previou ib_logs so that it could remake them. I'm just getting no where with this issue right now, after looking at google results for 2 hours.

Solution 1

After checking the logs I found the following error:

[ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB

I removed these files:

rm /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0
rm /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1 

at /var/lib/mysql

This resolved my problem after restart.

Solution 2

If you really need skip-innodb (use case: low memory footprint), then of course you don't have to comment it out. However, if InnoDB is the default storage engine, the server will fail to start until you tell it which storage engine to use instead, e.g. default-storage-engine=myisam for MyISAM.

So, try this:

$ sudo -u mysql mysqld --skip-innodb --default-storage-engine=myisam

Solution 3

If you're using MySQL 5.6+ and want to disable InnoDB, don't forget "--default-tmp-storage" or it won't work:

To disable InnoDB, use --innodb=OFF or --skip-innodb. In this case, because the default storage engine is InnoDB, the server will not start unless you also use --default-storage-engine and --default-tmp-storage-engine to set the default to some other engine for both permanent and TEMPORARY tables.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-parameters.html#option_mysqld_ignore-builtin-innodb

You can add this to your my.cnf:

[mysqld] 
innodb=OFF 
ignore-builtin-innodb 
skip-innodb
default-storage-engine=myisam 
default-tmp-storage-engine=myisam

just to make sure it'll work.

Solution 4

Check your mysql error log.

tail -100 /var/log/mysql/error.log

If your log says (like mine did):

InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
InnoDB: mmap(137363456 bytes) failed; errno 12
[ERROR] InnoDB: Cannot allocate memory for the buffer pool

You don't have enough memory to use the default buffer size of 128M

Edit the config file /etc/mysql/my.cnf adding a line to specify a smaller innodb_buffer_pool_size.

# make the buffer pool smaller than 128M since we only have 1 GB of total RAM
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M

Save the config file, and start mysql

sudo service mysql start

View more solutions

Comments

[Garrett]

Incidentally, I did get mysql to run by commenting out the "skip_innodb" entry in my.cnf. But I'm fairly certain that I wasn't supposed to solve this that way.

[RolandoMySQLDBA]

Please show all variables from my.cnf that are innodb settings

[Garrett]

Already did that, to no effect.

[johnshen64]

Sorry, edited it with some things to try, more like a bad package. Try to use the mysql.com version or percona which are usually more stable.

[johnshen64]

Also make sure the old package is completely purged, when the new is installed.

[Garrett]

Would purging the package completely result in lost database information?

[johnshen64]

Should not, but to be safe you should always backup your DBS.

[pincoded]

Try to add "default-storage-engine=myisam" to /etc/mysql/my.cnf in the [mysqld] section if you want to have "skip_innodb".

[Boann]

Works beautifully. Cheers!

[Mohsin]

What if you want innodb-support?

[Mohsin]

1. Helped for me - I was running at AWS EC2 Micro instance and 128MB was simply too much. "innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M" under the [mysqld] section of my.cnf did the trick

[Itai Ganot]

the rm command is used to Remove files rather than rename them as far as i know...

[Stefan Lasiewski]

Those files contain the actual data for your database. You don't want to delete them.

[Safado]

Why edits can only be made for 5 minutes is beyond me... I should have stated it is a potential fix for the above mentioned error. As stated by the OP, it was not the fix he needed.

[Giberno]

+1, Never notice the official document. it should set default-storage-engine and default-tmp-storage-engine, thanks.

[Ram on Rails React Native]

I could not "ignore or skip" innodb as I had at hand, over 10 years of data from a customer in that ibdata file. The only option was to keep "innodb" engine selected and make that data work with the mysql server.

[Rob Cle]

This solution also worked for me. No data damaged.

[Paul Carlton]

This solution worked for me as well. +1

[Dallaylaen]

Got this error after running out of free disk space during mysql (re)install. Finding & removing truncated files helped.

[kenorb]

You can always rename them, e.g. mv ib_logfile0 ib_logfile0.bak && mv ib_logfile1 ib_logfile1.bak.

[Damodar Bashyal]

Mariadb on Centos 7 added default-storage-engine=myisam on file /etc/my.cnf under [mysqld]. That did the trick. Thx

[sjas]

Is spot on here. But could also be hanging processes of the webserver or something eating up the RAM, do check that, too.

[Peter Chaula]

This works for some people and I appreciate that. However, the lack of an explanation as to how deleting those files fixes the problem has me worried.

[RavanH]

I found "[ERROR] InnoDB: Missing FILE_CHECKPOINT at 45142 between the checkpoint 45142 and the end 4115531." in the log not far before the "Unknown/unsupported storage engine" error. Deleting the /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0 (there was no ib_logfile1) indeed allowed me to run "service mysql start" without failing. But... Data was damaged. It was only only a local dev WordPress running but that needed a reinstall. Not sure if db corruption this was the cause of the error or the result of the file deletion :/