Make query ALTER TABLE run Faster?

I try to change one of field in table to small variable, from varchar(10) to char(2). Since I have big table (~ 35 mil. reconds, data on disk is ~ 8.6GB), it take time almost 4 days but it still not yet finish or complete, so I would like to know how to make this change faster or I need to change any system setting?


Server Spec.
Intel Pentium P4 4.0Ghz 4GB
Fedora Core 4
MySQL 4.1.16

 

holy cow !!!!!!!!!!!!!! a query for 4 days ?????????

 

Sometimes it's faster to create a new table and then just copy data from the old one. Maybe you could try that.

 

I had to add some indexs to a 300k record 1gig database, it was far faster to move it to a new database and add the indexes than it was to just add them in. I got stuck doing it the hard way because i also moved it to mysql 5 in the process