Can't start MySQL server (database corruption)

I successfully recovered the data by editing /etc/mysql/my.cnf (depending on your configuration, my.cnf may have a different location) by adding:

[mysqld]
innodb_force_recovery = 1

And then running:

sudo systemctl start mysql

It didn't work for the first time and I incremented the number to 2, 3 etc, retrying to start after each configuration update. Eventually it started.

Then I just I just commented out the innodb_force_recovery stuff and it restarted successfully (some operations are not allowed in the force recovery mode).

---

This answer was very helpful.

I tried everything written above, but nothing worked for me until I dared to try the next thing, which is based on the opposite idea

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
service mysql stop
killall -KILL mysql mysqld_safe mysqld
/etc/init.d/mysql start
service mysql start