MySQL is not running, but lock exists

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1 
[root@adroit ~]# service mysql status
MySQL is not running, but lock exists [FAILED]

I deleted the lock using

rm /var/lock/subsys/mysql

still the problem persists.

I tried using mysqld_safe, still the same issue. Unable to start mysql

[root@adroit ~]# mysqld_safe
nohup: ignoring input and redirecting stderr to stdout
Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
STOPPING server from pid file /var/lib/mysql/zabbix.pid
110510 17:33:17 mysqld ended
[root@adroit ~]#

Once the mysql is started after that only I can proceed further.

Please help.

2

How did the database go down in the first place. disk failure, server reboot, human error, you-don't-know?

What does the error log (mysqld.log) say?

3

The mysql went down because of server(where mysql is down) migration from one network to another.
After editing the required file for migration, server was rebooted.

I seems there is some human error, but no idea where ?

I don't find any mysqld.log.

adroit:/var/log 30 ] cd /var/log
adroit:/var/log 31 ] ls -lrt|grep mysqld
adroit:/var/log 31 ]

Is the database got corrupted??

4

What changes exactly were made to the configuration file? Whats the current IP configuration for the machine, what was the old configuration? Were any software upgrades done? Note that the log file isn't necessarily mysqld.log, but can also be named mysql.{log,err}, or is logging through the regular syslog mechanism.

A database corruption is rather unlikely if all that changed really is just the network configuration.