Disclaimer: Do this at your own risk! It doesn’t apply if you’re using Pluggable authentication and certainly won’t be usable if/when MySQL system tables are stored on InnoDB
Recover your root password with care!
What is the situation?
The situation is the classic “need to recover MySQL root password” but you cannot restart MySQL (because it is the master production server, or any other reason), which makes the –skip-grant-tables solution as a no-no possibility.
What can I do?
There is a workaround, which is the following:
- Launch another instance of mysqld, a small one (without innodb).
- Copy your user.[frm|MYD|MYI] files from the original datadir to the datadir of the new instance.
- Modify them and then copy …