From: Tim Thorburn
Date: June 12 2011 12:50pm
Subject: MySQL loses password?
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/225228
Message-Id: <4DF4B60E.4070706@athydro.com>
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Hi all,

I came across something strange today on my dev machine and thought I'd 
see if anyone here has run into a similar problem.  To begin, my dev 
machine is Win7 Ultimate 64-bit, running MySQL 5.5.11 (also 64-bit).  
Today when I tried to log into the server using the old MySQL GUI tools 
as root, I got an error number 1045 Access denied for user 
'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES).  This is odd because I've not 
changed the root password on my dev machine in years.  When I tried to 
goto a site on this same machine, Apache throws the following message:

mysqlnd cannot connect to MySQL 4.1+ using the old insecure 
authentication.  Please use an administration tool to reset your 
password with the command SET PASSWORD = 
PASSWORD('your_existing_password').  This will store a new, and more 
secure, hash value in mysql.user.  If this user is used in other scripts 
executed by PHP 5.2 or earlier you might need to remove the 
old-passwords flag from your my.cnf file

This is the first time I've seen such a message, or had MySQL randomly 
stop accepting my root password.  I'll likely be doing a complete 
uninstall and reinstall in a few hours on this machine, but thought I'd 
ask here to see if anyone had any thoughts as to why this happened, and 
how I might correct it?  If at all possible, I'd prefer to not have to 
do an uninstall/reinstall as I wisely hadn't backed up a few tables I 
was working on over the last couple days.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
-Tim