It looks like your database crashed. You'll want to stop MySQL first. Check out this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...d-as-crashed-and-last-automatic-repair-failed
I definitely don't want to play around with stopping MySQL if my endeavor to simply change an alt tag caused this problem. Are there any other possible solutions that can be derived from just editing the file?
It looks like just a coincidence. This is something that your host should be able to fix (which appears to be godaddy). They should also be able to restore it from a backup, if for some reason something was lost. I'm not sure how good their customer service is though.