Though I use linux a lot now a days I mostly use it as a user w/o knowing much of the intricacies involved. And mostly when I run into troubles, usually its either google or Hari who s there to give a helping hand. Here is something that he helped me with and which I gracefully flicked from his blog gee.. thanks Hari..


If you have set a root password, but forgot what it was, you can set a new password with the following procedure:

1. Take down the mysqld server by sending a kill (not kill -9) to the mysqld server. The pid is stored in a `.pid' file, which is normally in the MySQL database directory:

shell> kill `cat /mysql-data-directory/hostname.pid`

You must be either the Unix root user or the same user mysqld runs as to do this.
2. Restart mysqld with the --skip-grant-tables option.
3. Set a new password with the mysqladmin password command:

shell> mysqladmin -u root password 'mynewpassword'

4. Now you can either stop mysqld and restart it normally, or just load the privilege tables with:

shell> mysqladmin -h hostname flush-privileges

5. After this, you should be able to connect using the new password.

Alternatively, you can set the new password using the mysql client:

1. Take down and restart mysqld with the --skip-grant-tables option as described above.
2. Connect to the mysqld server with:

shell> mysql -u root mysql

3. Issue the following commands in the mysql client:

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('mynewpassword')
-> WHERE User='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

4. After this, you should be able to connect using the new password.
5. You can now stop mysqld and restart it normally.