Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist

Question

I am on a server that has afresh install on RHEL 5. I was able to install Apache and PHP just fine., but I am having serious trouble with my MySQL installation. I tried t

Answer 1

In Windows run the following commands in the command prompt as adminstrator

Step 1:
mysql_install_db.exe

Step 2:
mysqld --initialize

Step 3:
mysqld --console

Step 4:
In windows

Step 4:
mysqladmin -u root password "XXXXXXX"

Step 5:
mysql -u root -p

Answer 2

For myself, I had to do:

yum remove mysql*

rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/
cp /etc/my.cnf ~/my.cnf.bkup

yum install -y mysql-server mysql-client

mysql_install_db

chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql
chown -R mysql:mysql /var/log/mysql

service mysql start

Then I was able to get back into my databases and configure them again after I nuked them the first go around.

Answer 3

If you have a server which used to happily run MySQL, but now gives this error, then an uninstall and re-install of MySQL is overkill.

In my case, the server died and took a few disk blocks with it. This affected a few files, including /var/lib/mysql/mysql/host.frm and /var/lib/mysql/mysql/proc.frm

Luckily, I could copy these from another server, and this got me past that table error.

Answer 4

After chown and chgrp'ing /var/lib/mysql per the answer by @Bad Programmer, you may also have to execute the following command:

sudo mysql_install_db --user=mysql --ldata=/var/lib/mysql

Then restart your mysqld.

Answer 5

mysql_install_db –-user=mysql --ldata=/var/lib/mysql

Worked for me in Centos 7

Answer 6

On CentOS EL 6 and perhaps on earlier versions there is one way to get into this same mess.

Install CentOS EL6 with a minimal installation. For example I used kickstart to install the following:

%packages
@core
acpid
bison
cmake
dhcp-common
flex
gcc
gcc-c++
git
libaio-devel
make
man
ncurses-devel
perl
ntp
ntpdate
pciutils
tar
tcpdump
wget
%end

You will find that one of the dependencies of the above list is mysql-libs. I found that my system has a default my.cnf in /etc and this contains:

[mysqld]
dataddir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
user=mysql
# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0

[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

When you build from the Generic Linux (Architecture Independent), Compressed TAR Archive your default data directory is /usr/local/mysql/data which conflicts with the /etc/my.cnf already present which defines datadir=/var/lib/mysql. Also the pid-file defined in the same file does not have permissions for the mysql user/group to write to it in /var/run/mysqld.

A quick remedy is to mv /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf.old which should get your generic source procedure working.

Of course the experience is different of you use the source RPMs.