
I eventually managed to restart the daemon by adding the following line to MYSQL_ROOT:[VMS]MY.CNF,
[mysqld]
innodb_force_recovery = 2
I could than manually go into mysql and drop the wiki database,
mysql> drop database wikidb;
Next, set the recovery variable back to 0 and restart.
At this stage I have no idea if this was a fluke or if MediaWiki is doing something horrible to the tables and it is repeatable. At some stage I'll get around to trying it again. But please take heed of this error.