R1soft has a nice database restore function which I would say is hit or miss process. When it keeps failing you can do the below steps to recovery manually.
IMPORTANT! DONT COPY AND PASTE
First you need to restore /var/lib/mysql from a backup to somewhere like /var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql. Once you have done that you cant start up a second mysql process to do a dump.
edit: /var/lib/mysql_restore/my.cnf
[server]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql/
port=3307
socket=/var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql2.sock
pid-file=/var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql.pid
general_log_file=/var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql.log
log-error=/var/lib/mysql_restore/mysql-err.log
tmpdir=/var/lib/mysql_restore/tmp
start mysql
su -c 'mysqld --defaults-file=/var/lib/mysql_restore/my.cnf' mysql
dump databases
mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 -e 'show databases' > dbs.txt
cat dbs.txt | while read line ; do mysqldump -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 $line > $line.sql; gzip $line.sql; done
import database from backup
cat DATABASE_DUMP.sql.gz | mysql
Now kill the second mysql process and clean up after yourself.