Installing MySQL on Windows

Question

I'm trying to install MySQL on Windows XP using the .msi installer. When the server has been installed, an instance configuration wizard starts which enables one to configure options. Once I've stepped through all the options, I get to this screens which hangs indefinitely:

The only options I really need to configure are

• Innodb is default storage engine
• UTF8 is default character encoding
• Install as windows service

If someone could indicate how to perform the tasks above manually, then I guess I could use the .zip version of the windows installer instead.

Update: I've managed to install MySql as a service (thanks Sam), but I can't find the my.cnf file in order to change the other options. Do I need to create this file myself somewhere?

Answer 1

This can all be done manually, however you may find its one of these that is causing setup to hang, particually installing as a service, check you have nothing else running on port 3306, or whatever other port you set MYSQL to use.

Anyway, to do it manually:

To install MYSQL as a service on Windows run the following command:

"C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server x.x\bin\mysqld" --install

To set the default storage engine to innoDB, change the storage_engine line in your my.cnf file to:

 storage_engine=InnoDB

To set the charector set to UTF-8 you need to change the following options in your my.cnf file:

character-set-server=utf8
default-collation=utf8_unicode_ci

Answer 2

my.ini = my.cnf I've seen the comments at the top of the file in some distros say that they're interchangable, one for unix and one for windows.