Oh Vista, how do I dislike thee!

Grr – trying to install MySQl server 5.0 on Windows Vista was rather frustrating, as it simply stopped with “Unable to start service, error 1067”. Especially annoying as I flawlessly installed the thing on my XP laptop in two minutes last night.

You would think someone would have fixed this now, but no, the googlesphere advice seemed to be to re-run the install program as administrator. This failed to work. But I gathered from faint intimations that you had to remove the service for it to be properly re-installed. So, the steps that seemed to work for me were:

  1. Run regedit
  2. Delete the key MySQL from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
  3. Reboot (important, otherwise the service does not go away)
  4. Go to C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin
  5. Right click on MySQLInstanceConfig.exe, and choose “Run as administrator”
  6. Set it up as you want, and cross your fingers when it comes to starting the service.

Worked for me!