Technology Blog

If you are having problems installing MySQL 5.1 for Windows and are reading this, you are not alone. Over the past 5 hours I have beaten my head trying to install this thing to no avail.

MySQL 5.1 won't install on my Windows XP SP 3 system. I keep getting to step 4 of the Server Instance Configuration Wizard and coming up with an error saying that it cannot connect to the server. It even offers suggestions that my firewall is to blame and that I should allow TCP 3306 access. It gets even worse after mysqld.exe crashes.

I tried everything I could:

1. Turned off firewall and reinstalled
2. Deinstalled firewall and reinstalled MySQL
3. Gave MySQL all trusted rights and reinstalled
4. etc. etc. etc.

None of that works. The only solution I had without wasting more of my time today was to to revert back to MySQL 5.0. Something is wrong with MySQL 5.1 for Windows installation. I had no problems installing 5.0. I took a quick look at the MySQL forums and saw some threads on there with the same problem.