Fatal error: can't open and lock privilege tables: table 'mysql.user' doesn't exist

Question

Problem :

I have very recently installed the MySQL community server 5.7.10 using binary zip. I have also extracted the zip in the c:\mysql and created my data folder in c:\mysql\data. I have also  created the config file as my.ini and placed it in the  c:\mysql in the root folder of the extracted zip. Following 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 want to start MySQL using mysqld --console, but the process is often aborted with the following error message :

2019-12-14T18:04:01.141930Z 0 [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.user' doesn't exist

2019-12-14T18:04:01.141930Z 0 [ERROR] Aborting 

Please let me know if you have any solution on above error message.

Answer 1

On the Maria DB please use mysql_install_db. In my case I tried to use the environment variable for my data path. Not only does the mysqld need to know where your data is and it is specified via commandline, but so does your install script.

Below is the way you can call the install script specifying your datapath:

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

 

Hope it resolves your issue.