A Pinoy DBA's Blog: MySQL: Root user loses grant privileges

One of our departments requested assistance from our group to add another user to their MySQL database. So, I logged into their db as root and added the user. However, when I tried to grant certain privileges to the user I just created, I got this error:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost'

I checked the mysql.user table and root doesn't have the grant privilege. This was the reason why I get the access denied message.

mysql> select * from mysql.user where user = 'root' and host = 'localhost' \G

*************************** 1. row ***************************

Host: localhost

User: root

Password: **************************

Select_priv: Y

Insert_priv: Y

Update_priv: Y

Delete_priv: Y

Create_priv: Y

Drop_priv: Y

Reload_priv: Y

Shutdown_priv: Y

Process_priv: Y

File_priv: Y

Grant_priv: N

References_priv: Y

Index_priv: Y

Alter_priv: Y

Show_db_priv: Y

Super_priv: Y

Create_tmp_table_priv: Y

Lock_tables_priv: Y

Execute_priv: Y

Repl_slave_priv: Y

Repl_client_priv: Y

Create_view_priv: Y

Show_view_priv: Y

Create_routine_priv: Y

Alter_routine_priv: Y

Create_user_priv: Y

Event_priv: Y

Trigger_priv: Y

Create_tablespace_priv: Y

ssl_type:

ssl_cipher:

x509_issuer:

x509_subject:

max_questions: 0

max_updates: 0

max_connections: 0

max_user_connections: 0

plugin:

authentication_string: NULL

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

To solve this problem:

1. Shutdown MySQL.

2. Start it up with --skip-grant-tables option.

3. Log into the database as root.

4. Update the mysql.user table.

update mysql.user set grant_priv = 'Y' where user = 'root';

5. Restart MySQL.

Querying the mysql.user table again: