This was years ago and trust me it was corrupt. I think there may have been some issues with InnoDB in those days that made it a bit fragile in that situation.
My apologies if it sounded like I was doubting that there was corruption - I was not. I was doubting that merely sending kill -9 to the process was the sole cause of the corruption. More than likely it uncovered the corruption due to having to do recovery against corrupted data.
In the postmortem it seemed that by issuing the shutdown but not waiting for it to complete the database ended up in a strange state that we could never fully recover from.
I guess the moral here is tread lightly and take the time to be informed before you just smack something with a club.
