After replacing the hard drive in my laptop, I realized I forgot to make a backup of my databases. I still have the old drive available as external harddisk, but I can't boot into it.
The OS on both the old and new machine are Ubuntu 16.04, and the MariaDb version on both is 10.* The databases are all innodb.
I've tried pointing the datadir of my new installation to the old datadir, but that results in mysqld never starting.
I still have the complete disk, including the old mariadb binaries. Is there some way I can run those? I just need them for a few minutes to do a backup.
I have no idea if pointing to the old datadir works. What I did and it worked fine for me in order to move data from an old server to a new one is: installed mysqld services on a new machine and before starting it, synced the data directory. After that starting the mysqld service on the new server I could find all databases completely intact.