MariaDB Won't Start After Installing

Solution 1:

OK, so after a lot of messing around with this I ended up completely removing/purging MariaDB and everything to mysql.

I ran:

sudo apt purge mariadb* *mariadb mysql* *mysql
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

sudo find / | grep mysql I then removed any remaining files for mysql

sudo find / | grep mariadb I then removed any remaining files for mariadb

sudo deluser --remove-home mysql

sudo delgroup mysql

This is probably overkill, but I was getting frustrated with this. After removing everything I just went back to mysql and installed mysql-server. Was able to get it up and running this time with no issues.

I THINK there may have been an issue with a symlink from when I originally had mysql instead of MariaDB, but after just nuking it and starting over from scratch I was able to get it working.