Recently, I came back to an existing WSL2 installation of MySQL, which unfortunately failed to start the mysql service (“MySQL has been frozen to prevent damage to your system.”). As I didn’t need any of the data, that I potentially used in the past, I decided to do a clean reinstallation of mysql-server, which turned out to be a bit tricker than I thought at first.
WARNING: This will delete your databases! Do not do this, if you want to retain your data!
sudo apt-get remove --purge mysql-server mysql-client mysql-common
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /etc/mysql
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
This worked successfully, but then the mysql service still didn’t want to start, because now the database was completely uninitialized.
sudo mysqld --initialize
And finally, to make sure we’re securing the installation:
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Now you can access mysql by running: sudo mysql
Troubleshoot
If you an error similar to the following:
mysqld: Error on realpath() on '/var/lib/mysql-files' (Error 2 - No such file or directory)
It means, that you didn’t properly delete all the /var/lib/mysql* directories before and thus things weren’t correctly initialized when running sudo mysqld --initialize
Do the steps above again, but make sure the directories are deleted first this time.