Cannot start mysqld_safe to reset root password

Question

I installed MySQL and was playing around with the password settings trying to get Wordpress to connect to it. In doing so, I seem to have hashed my root password and now cannot login.

I'm trying to reset the password by running

/etc/init.d/mysqld stop

Then

mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables

Which outputs

Starting mysql daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

But then does nothing. It neither succeeds nor fails. I've not got any databases setup so I'd be happy to remove and reinstall mysql if necessary but I tried that to no avail. How can I get back in?

Answer 1

have you tried "mysqld --skip-grant-tables" instead of mysqld_safe? make sure to kill any mysqld threads that didn't die before starting mysqld --skip-grant-tables. Do a ps -ef and grep for mysql, kill -9 any mysql process, then start it --skip-grants-tables.

Answer 2

mysqld_safe is the command to start the mysql engine. It's not supposed to do or show anything after the line saying that it's started mysql. Once you've run mysqld_safe, the next step is to run mysql. Because you started mysqld with --skip-grant-tables you won't need to specify a username or password.

You can then give the command to reset root's password. For instructions on how to set a password, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/set-password.html .