This is vastly OT but hey, it happened to me just this month! It IS in the docs:

A.4.2 How to Reset a Forgotten Password

If you have forgotten the root user password for MySQL, you can restore it with the following procedure:

  1. Take down the mysqld server by sending a kill (not kill -9) to the mysqld server. The pid is stored in a .pid file, which is normally in the MySQL database directory:
    kill `cat /mysql-data-directory/hostname.pid`

    You must be either the Unix root user or the same user the server runs as to do this.
  2. Restart mysqld with the --skip-grant-tables option.
  3. Connect to the mysqld server with mysql -h hostname mysql and change the password with a GRANT command. See section 4.3.1 GRANT and REVOKE Syntax. You can also do this with mysqladmin -h hostname -u user password 'new password'
  4. Load the privilege tables with: mysqladmin -h hostname flush-privileges or with the SQL command FLUSH PRIVILEGES.

Note that after you started mysqld with --skip-grant-tables, any usage of GRANT commands will give you an Unknown command error until you have executed FLUSH PRIVILEGES.

In reply to Re: Setting MySQL root password by mirod
in thread Setting MySQL root password by NodeReaper

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