No I don't mean the tables that you write on, I am referring to MySQL database tables.  A couple of days back, there was some voltage fluctuation at home due to which the computer got shut off several times (besides that, it hanged on a few other occasions as well).  And because of this one of the tables in my database got corrupted.  This has nothing to do with the database I am actually using on the site, it happened to my database at home.  I am writing about it here because it might be helpful to somebody.

If you get strange errors when you try to execute select queries on your tables, then first you have to check them.  In your bin directory wherever you installed MySQL, you will have a program called myisamchk.  First stop your server properly, then run the program on your table like so - myisamchk ../data/databasename/tablename.myi, and if it finds any errors (caused because the server may have been abruptly shut down), you can use myisamchk -r -q whatever.myi for a quick recovery, or if that doesn't work, myisamchk --safe-recover whatever.myi.

This is all thanks to the MySQL User Manual, fortunately I was able to restore my table easily.  And I was thinking of doing something drastic like dropping the table, getting a dump of all my queries from phpMyAdmin, and repeating them all again!