Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.user' doesn't exist

Question

I installed MySQL community server 5.7.10 using binary zip. I extracted the zip in c:\mysql and created the data folder in c:\mysql\data. I created the config file as my.ini and placed it in c:\mysql (root folder of extracted zip). Below is the content of the my.ini file

# set basedir to your installation path basedir=C:\mysql # set datadir to the location of your data directory datadir=C:\mysql\data 

I'm trying to start MySQL using mysqld --console, but the process is aborted with the below error.

2015-12-29T18:04:01.141930Z 0 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.user' doesn't exist 2015-12-29T18:04:01.141930Z 0 [ERROR] Aborting  

Any help on this will be appreciated.

Answer 1

You have to initialize the data directory by running the following command

mysqld --initialize [with random root password]

mysqld --initialize-insecure [with blank root password]

Answer 2

The mysql_install_db script also needs the datadir parameter:

mysql_install_db --user=root --datadir=$db_datapath 

On Maria DB you use the install script mysql_install_db to install and initialize. In my case I use an environment variable for the data path. Not only does mysqld need to know where the data is (specified via commandline), but so does the install script.