Disclaimer: hobbyist programmer, not a professional in any sense, and no skill whatsoever with system admin stuff, especially databases.
Lots of people have the same problem I"m having, but none of the solutions I've seen out there work for me. It seems like the details are different for each case. My system crashed not long ago, but I had a fairly recent backup of everything under my MAMP mysql folder, so I thought I'd be ok. But restoring the mysql folder from the backup doesn't seem to work, which seems to jive with what I've read from everyone else asking the same question. When I run MAMP, mysql simply won't start. The logfile (below) says that I should do something with my.cnf, but I can't find a my.cnf anywhere, and like I say, I just installed MAMP, so I thought it would be there.
Anyway, how can I fix this? Am I simply screwed?
140520 22:01:33 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql
140520 22:01:33 [Warning] Setting lower_case_table_names=2 because file system for /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/ is case insensitive
140520 22:01:33 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
InnoDB: Error: space header page consists of zero bytes in data file ./ibdata1
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: Could not open or create data files.
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: If you tried to add new data files, and it failed here,
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: you should now edit innodb_data_file_path in my.cnf back
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: to what it was, and remove the new ibdata files InnoDB created
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: in this failed attempt. InnoDB only wrote those files full of
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: zeros, but did not yet use them in any way. But be careful: do not
140520 22:01:33 InnoDB: remove old data files which contain your precious data!
140520 22:01:33 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error.
140520 22:01:33 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed.
140520 22:01:33 [ERROR] Unknown/unsupported storage engine: InnoDB
140520 22:01:33 [ERROR] Aborting
140520 22:01:33 [Note] /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqld: Shutdown complete
140520 22:01:33 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid ended