linux - Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist

Question

I am on a server that has afresh install on RHEL 5. I was able to install Apache and PHP just fine., but I am having serious trouble with my MySQL installation. I tried the following:

yum install mysql-server mysql 

And didn't get any errors or conflicts. Then I tried to start mysql with the following commands:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
service mysqld start

And get Timeout error occurred trying to start MySQL Daemon.

I checked my logs and see this error:

[ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist

I'm not sure where to go from here.

For reference I am using RHEL 5 and installed the latest versions of PHP 5 and Apache.

Answer 1

After chown and chgrp'ing /var/lib/mysql per the answer by @Bad Programmer, you may also have to execute the following command:

sudo mysql_install_db --user=mysql --ldata=/var/lib/mysql

Then restart your mysqld.