This server (running suse 11.1) was approaching a year of uptime when last night it became unresponsive @ max cpu and was given a hard reset. Suddenly mysql no longer works, it fails to secure a socket and shuts down. The error log says it can't load a bunch of stuff in /usr/lib/mysql/plugin/ because there's no such directory, then aborts after the unknown option --skip-federated. If I comment out skip-federated in /etc/my.cnf mysql will start, but users get access denied--I can't say if the same is true for root, I don't have root credentials for mysql.

This is all very funny because I need to finish/present my final project in a few hours and also happen to be the server admin, yet haven't been able to dig myself out of this hole, 5 hours has produced virtually no progress. Any help would be profoundly appreciated.

As I suspected, I was just approaching it wrong. The solution was to start the mysql daemon with the very specific command
though it took a bit more to get all the tables up. I had tried various other ways of starting, and though they provoked some sign of life, clearly they weren't correct.