mysqldump skipping some tables while taking a backup

Question

I'm trying to take a full dump of my database. While taking a dump, mysqldump skips a few tables, especially those with foreign keys. It's not that every table with foreign keys is skipped. Some specific tables only!

I tried the -f switch. It forced it to include a few tables but still two tables are being skipped.

Is this normal? I mean, does this happen? Does my schema has some problems? How can this be solved?

Answer 1

In reference to @Nikhil's comment on McAfee. I ran into a situation where McAfee was trying to read (and thus was blocking) the temporary files that MySQL creates when queries move from in memory to temporary. We had to create a specific rule that prevented McAfee from trying to scan the temporary file so that MySQL wouldn't have issues. In this situation my educated guess would be that McAfee was doing something similar with the MySQL dump process.