I'm trying to create an EBS AMI from my running EC2 instance to reuse my LAMP fully configured (for my needs). I got my website up and running yesterday on this EC2 instance my MySQL was working fine until this morning (it's not that difficult to install LAMP thanks to yum so I can't see how I could go wrong with this; having said that, it's always difficult for one to realise his own errors)

1. I have seen "Loading, please wait ..." for a few hours now. How do I know whether this is completed or its progress?

2. Shortly after I tried to create the AMI image from my EC2 instance, I encountered database connection error

can't connect to local mysql server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock'

I was able to restart mysqld at first. But database connection was down again. This time, I could not restart mysqld anymore. It shows

MySQL Daemon failed to start.

Could my attempt to create the AMI by any chance cause the MySQL server to reboot or corrupt?

I did a lot of searched and have done the following although I think I shouldn't have to do any workaround for MySQL server to work here

chown -R mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql/

I also found this workaround but I'm very reluctant to follow due to my belief and the fact I would need to understand this problem first.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Getting back to searching for a solution for the MySQL server problem ...

Thanks, Eric