40 thoughts on “MySQL upgrade breaking things”

1. Matias May 16, 2006 at 8:07 pm

   This tip saved my life!
   Anyway, as stupid as it can seem (and it is!) I copy-pasted the mysql_safe command and got myself a lot of troubles until I realized that the hyphens before ‘skip-grant-tables’ and ‘user’ are not the ones that one must enter. So if anyone wants to use it, type the whole command by hand!
   Thank you for pointing these tips.
2. Robin Elvin May 18, 2006 at 12:38 pm

   The hyphens should be double hyphens like so:

   mysqld_safe –-skip-grant-tables -–user=root &

   Then it worked for me. Great tip, thanks.
3. John May 18, 2006 at 12:53 pm

   Ah yes, that’s my blogging tool thinking dash dash is one long dash. Grr! Glad that I’m actually helping people though and not just wasting my time writing stuff! heh.
4. Arnvid May 22, 2006 at 4:43 pm

   Hey,

   Good tip – they should have had this in the manual too – Google + friendly internet users saves the day again.
5. Abraham May 30, 2006 at 3:23 am

   Awesome tip!! got me up and running again.
6. Eric Litman June 4, 2006 at 5:49 am

   Thanks for the tip.
7. Wolfgang June 6, 2006 at 4:43 pm

   THANK YOU!! Great tip! I found it after hours and it was my last hope.
8. Daniel Drake June 7, 2006 at 4:21 am

   Thanks, worked perfectly
9. Mike Slinn June 15, 2006 at 9:33 am

   John, thanks for the tip and everyone else, thanks for the info re. the double dashes.
10. GS June 15, 2006 at 4:08 pm

    Thanks for these few lines with so much effect !!
11. Owen June 19, 2006 at 1:42 am

    Thanks very much for this blog post. Dumping the error message within my mysqld.err logfile into Google brought me straight to your page!

    Now my blog is fixed.

    Keep up the good work!
12. JCrew June 20, 2006 at 2:02 am

    Like all of the above, thanks a million!
13. ksclarke July 3, 2006 at 6:43 am

    great tip! thanks, it saved me.
14. biffhardwell July 4, 2006 at 1:15 am

    The command, once I used the double dashes, failed for me. Looking at the mysql.err log showed it complaining that specifying ‘root’ was the culprit, so I had to leave that off. This was on a gentoo system, so perhaps there’s a gentooism there.

    In any event, this worked fine with those corrections. Thanks for the tip!
15. moodboom July 12, 2006 at 12:38 am

    Thanks, I’m good too now. I tried everything, this was what I needed.
16. John July 14, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    Wow, can’t believe so many people found that so useful!

    Remember, if you want to help me, just link me on your site! Cheese!
17. Don Park July 19, 2006 at 7:28 am

    oh thank you! this was the only guide that actually worked. the other guides tell me to run mysql when its mysqld that wont even start. the –skip-grant-tables is the magic to get mysqld to start. this saved my butt! thank you!
18. Alex July 21, 2006 at 11:30 am

    really really really hot tip!!
19. Xavier July 23, 2006 at 7:08 am

    Winner. Thanks a heap. Didn’t need the –user=root on gentoo.
20. Brett August 4, 2006 at 10:16 am

    Thanks… this saved our summer projects at the school where i work… there was a mysql database with all our imaging settings in it…. and poof it died when a gentoo upgrade killed the database…. THanks

    Brett
21. John August 7, 2006 at 2:49 pm

    I no longer recommend using Gentoo…or at least as a server platform. I find it wayy to time consuming/over-complicated to keep things up to date. I now use Debian again. Fair enough it’s probably not quite as fast and doesn’t tend to include so many modern packages, but it’s solid as fuck.

    I’m also moving towards using Xen anyway, which I may blog upon in the coming months.
22. egm August 18, 2006 at 4:56 am

    Late to the game, but thankful all the same. Your tip helped me resolve my mysql issues.
23. GoudviZ September 7, 2006 at 6:12 pm

    thanks for saving me a big headache
24. Matthijs September 15, 2006 at 10:28 pm

    Thanks for the this tip, It took took me almost al day to figure out that looking in to the log file /var/log/mysql/mysld.err could give me a hint.

    Congratuations John, you made it to the “I am feeling lucky” position in google for the error message I found in this log file look at this here …

    http://www.google.nl/search?q=Fatal+error%3A+mysql.user+table+is+damaged+or+in+unsupported+3.20+format.
25. Jackg September 23, 2006 at 11:53 pm

    John Says: Remember, if you want to help me, just link me on your site! Cheese!

    So I did: http://www.greenbaum.org/community/node/139
26. fred point October 4, 2006 at 6:17 pm

    Thanks a lot !!!

    I was downgrading when I saw your tips : It saves me some of my time
27. ofeet October 25, 2006 at 4:39 pm

    thanks for the tip!
28. Dennis November 5, 2006 at 6:37 pm

    Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So what I’m really trying to say is… thank you. I haven’t had much time to work on my server lately so after a month of my database being down I searched through the logs and found the error message that lead me to this page and ultimately to database salvation. I am covered in relief right now. Thank you.
29. mike November 7, 2006 at 6:58 am

    Ok, this is getting redundant, but THANKS!

    Found this via google and it fixed me right up.
30. John November 7, 2006 at 7:04 pm

    Remember, if you found this useful, you can do me a favour by linking to my site (like this):
    John Hunt!

    Thanks!
31. jared February 1, 2007 at 5:30 am

    Yessir! Thank you. I think Google has already done you the favour…
32. james February 22, 2007 at 8:42 am

    thanks a ton! now to solve other upgrade issues with php and apache.
33. Mike March 18, 2007 at 5:03 am

    Thanks a lot, much appreciated.
34. Antony March 22, 2007 at 3:47 am

    thank you for your solution! it helps me a lot!
35. Matthew Miller August 6, 2007 at 5:32 am

    Yet another happy admin whom this post helped immensely! I’ve linked to it from our KB.

    Thanks!
36. Spam September 6, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Uh oh.. I didn’t have such good luck..

    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user
    070906 0:29:11 [Warning] Found invalid password for user: ‘(removed) @localhost ‘; Ignoring user

    “(removed) ” = me editing out the usernames, naturally.
    
37. J Anderson November 3, 2007 at 7:24 am

    I’ll buy you a beer, m8.
38. Jorge November 23, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    Another life saved. Thanks !
39. Binary Runner November 25, 2007 at 2:49 pm

    Invalid password warnings are caused by change of algorithm in passwd fucntion, I guess. Start mysql with –skip-grant-tables again and update the user table records in mysql database manually. It worked for me prfectly. I hope you do not have too much records with password there.
40. John November 30, 2008 at 2:32 am

    It might be just over a year since the last entry but this fix still works, you saved me (judging from the above) hours of frustration. Instead it was like fifteen seconds (after I figured out what you were all talking about with double dashes) and bam!