#1030 - Got error 12 from storage engine - HELP

[Kwesi Nkromah]

After a long relaxing 2 day vacation from the daily rigors of work, I return to my desk to check the status of my website. WWW.poke - whateverDOTcom and to my surprise the database is down. however, it's not that big of a suprise, the server dies constantly. Knowing this i head to my control panel to preform the necessary steps to restart the database and site using phpMyAdmin / Cpanel but when i get to the MySQL control panel, no database was listed! Well, i thought to myself, this is obviously the problem with the database... there is none. Before leaving for my trip i made a backup so i wasn't to worried about the lost data. I headed to phpMyAdmin and got this error:

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Error

SQL query: Edit

SHOW CHARACTER SET;

MySQL said: Documentation
#1030 - Got error 12 from storage engine
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so the plot thickens. I'm not sure what this means, I'm not much of a MSQL programmer but it seems as-if MySQL has completely crashed on my server. Can anyone help me discover what happened? or at-least point me in the right direction?

thanks in advamce - Kwesi