What could cause “Access denied” when trying to access my own MySQL on Windows?

Question

I just installed MySQL on my WinXP machine. I try to login and get this:

$ mysql -u root -h 127.0.0.1 -p my_database
Enter password: ************
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

I created a database my_database in the MySQL GUI with the correct username and password. What could cause this problem?

Answer 1

Oh, got it, I needed to set a password like this:

mysqladmin -u root password my_password