Mining without bitcoin-qt.exe?

[bitcoinnewbie]

Hi,
I've read a lot about Bitcoin and have decided to try solo mining. I realize that it's a bit like playing the lottery now - probably not economical to do so, usually - but operational costs are not a concern for me at this time. However, I have run into problems with the bitcoin official client, bitcoin-qt.exe: after two unintended shutdowns, I got the error with the blkindex.dat file. I know I can clear appdata and reinstall it, but that requires spending hours downloading the blocks all over again each time, and I suspect further shutdowns may occur so it'll be quite a pain having to re-do it each time. I'm using guiminer and it seems to require this particular client for solo mining. Is there any other client with faster load times and/or a different miner I can try? Is it possible to solo mine with a light client, or no client at all?

Thank you.

[janbanan]

first; let me discourage you from solo mining, a pool will provide a more stable income.
bitcoind is a headless daemon you could use instead of bitcoin-qt.

[NothinG]

You don't need the Bitcoin client to mine coins in pools, which is recommended unless you're pushing +20Gh/s.

If you want to download the latest (nightly) copy of the blockchain for restores, check out http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/.

[bitcoinnewbie]

Yeah, I know I probably won't strike it lucky, but as a newbie to this, solo mining is something I'd like to try once before probably inevitably giving up on it. Thanks, I'll look into bitcoind. If I download the latest blockchain from http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/ will that correct the blkindex.dat error on a current bitcoin client installation?

[NothinG]

Yeah, I know I probably won't strike it lucky, but as a newbie to this, solo mining is something I'd like to try once before probably inevitably giving up on it. Thanks, I'll look into bitcoind. If I download the latest blockchain from http://eu1.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/ will that correct the blkindex.dat error on a current bitcoin client installation?

It should.

If not, make sure you're at the latest Bitcoin version (0.6.3).

[Gabi]

You need to run it if you want to mine with P2Pool, wich i suggest.

Or there are some pools based on it, you can mine on them without having bitcoin-qt.exe running

[bitcoinnewbie]

Well I am mainly concerned with solo mining at this time. I just want to try it awhile and see what happens. Thanks to this forum's assistance I have fixed some problems and am now mining for the first time. In other news, today I made my first bitcoins (from some ad viewing program). A whole 0.00306. I'm rich.