Recovering MySQL root password (XAMPP)

Question

I posted this on StackOverflow and was told to come here.

I have an XAMPP MySQL installation and want to recover the root password. I am aware that questions have asked this already, however they are Linux methods of doing it (I'm on Windows) and I can't seem to figure out what exactly the Linux commands translate to in XAMPP - I tried looking for a place to configure the arguments to not use network etc but couldn't. This is a localhost installation.

Answer 1

This resetroot.bat method did not work for me, even after following the instructions above.

My XAMPP uses this DB version:

• Server: MariaDB
• Server version: 10.0.17-MariaDB mariadb.org binary distribution

However, using this answer, I was able to do it manually.

• Go to your **xampp\mysql\bin** folder
• Edit my.ini and insert skip-grant-tables below [mysqld]
• Restart MySQL
• Set new password for your root user by running UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('new_password') WHERE User='root' in phpMyAdmin in the mysql database (or just leave it like this if MySQL cannot be accessed from remote hosts)
• Remove the skip-grant-tables in the my.ini file

Answer 2

Turns out I can now answer this question myself, thanks to the help of @James in the comments. The article here was helpful, but not 100% accurate anymore, so here is how to do it for anyone in the future:

1. Navigate to the mysql folder (C:/xampp/mysql in my case).
2. Open resetroot.bat in a text editor.
3. Look for line 8 (the article above specifies line 18 - the file is only 15 lines long now)
4. Add –datadir=c:/xampp/mysql/data into the mysql\bin\mysqld.exe line after –no-defaults
5. Run resetroot.bat and you're done :)