Originally posted by v ray:
But I need the entire table to be sorted so that if the query breaks in the middle, I need to be able to resume the query from the last id onwards.
You can't sort the table. It sounds like you are trying to accomplish saving the database work, which you can do another way.
You can create an index on the id column and order that index (when you create the index, you specify it as a sorted index.) Scanning an index is much faster than scanning the tables which can reduce the overall work.