Following up on this…
I ended up deleting the one aria_log* file and rebooting. There was no change, though a new log file with the next sequential number was created.
I then ran aria_chk -r again. As before, there didn’t seem to be any action undertaken, but just that the list of options was displayed. Maybe I was mistaken but it really didn’t look like anything happened!
I rebooted again, with no change.
Then I started and stopped the mariaDB service service mariadb stop then service mariadb start. Reboot again, and lo and behold the system info on the web interface reports that MariaDB is up.
Then turn maintenance mode off and reboot again, and now HBP is back up too. So I seem to be back in business.
But it’s not clear what happened and what fixed it. I would have expected the many reboots I did over the past few days would have started the mariadb service. Maybe aria_chk -r did more than I thought it did.
If anyone else has comments about what had happened it would be appreciated.