'Incorrect key file for table ...' caused crash

[Dimitri Beckers]

Hi,

One morning our mysqlserver got out of disk space (yeah I know, pretty stupid).
All queries got locked and I don't even know what our db-administrater did to solve the problem.

But, in the logs of my application I noticed the following error (this occurred immediately when the server started up):
'Incorrect key file for table article. try to repair it'
On other tables, there were also errors:
'x client(s) is/are using or hasn't closed the table properly'

Nobody noticed the problems in the logs, and 14 hours later, this article-table crashed so no queries could get executed.
'Table article is marked as crashed and should be repaired'.

I can only guess that the incorrect key file caused the table to crash. But how's that possible? And, is this the cause of the crash? Can queries make a table crash and whys that?

Thank you for your reply!