Three ways to recover a root user password:
The order of solutions here under gets more creative on the way down :)
1. obviously, before starting messing around check my.cnf or scripts for passwords entries, then try home directories for password files
2. secondly – can you restart mysql? if yes, restart with –skip-grant-tables, log into mysql, change your password and restart without –skip-grant-tables
3. third option – (on linux / unix ONLY)
If you haven’t found the password anywhere and can’t afford to restart your mysql.
cd data/mysql cp -rp user.MYD bck_user.MYD_`date +%Y%m%d` cp -rp user.MYD /tmp/user.MYD vi /tmp/user.MYD #(edit the hashed passwords next to root*) cp -rp /tmp/user.MYD user.MYD sudo kill -HUP `pidof mysqld`
Note that the latter method of recovering a root password CAN be easily used maliciously leaving no trace! The only way to avoid such an attack is to make the data directory ONLY readable and writable by the user used to start/stop mysql (don’t user *nix root user to own mysql since that opens another can of worms … it’s a whole other blog post).
